Milly James is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist with an open-ended, process-driven approach to painting. James’s paintings endeavour to see what is unknown. Through varied gestures the artist renders the point where form becomes image, and a finished work reveals the depth of its own process. Auratic in nature, her works are a conduit for intuitive acts and unconscious processes. James's practice is ongoing investigation into the possibilities and ambiguities of painterly abstraction and its peculiar temporalities.
Painting is therefore self-referential for James. And in this sense, she paints pictures where abstraction seems to forever be doing abstraction. That is, her work continuously dilates and contracts in on itself – it whirs between expression and representation. James makes visible the afterlives of the artist’s hand, and so her paintings move between worlds.
Camille Orel, 2023.