Catalogue: Home Dartmoor

My relationship to Dartmoor is explored in an exhibition at the recently reopened Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. One audience for this was the people who live in the area and would see the exhibition.

Another just as important constituency was the art world in the UK and beyond. The publication that accompanies the exhibition was designed to define Dartmoor for them, a word they might only have vaguely heard of.

It also explores the influence of Dartmoor on my work and life over 25 years. It is placing a distinct local place within the international art world.

Home Dartmoor is a small, deep, cloth-bound volume with 160 pages and colour plates. It is a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

The format I adopted was a conversation and the whole book is designed around it. The conversation is with Tom Greeves, a cultural environmentalist, whom I met in the mid-1980s when I was invited to participate in the Artists’ Parish Maps exhibition organised by Common Ground.

We both identified visual material, commissioned new work from a mapmaker and selected appropriate work from the museum’s collections.

A catalogue is always a collaboration between the different agencies that come together to support it. I worked with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Ingleby Gallery and HackelBury Fine Art. But because the project had received a substantial award from Arts Council England, I had an unusual amount of freedom.

I was interested in the publishing models such as Wild Hawthorn Press (set up by the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay) and the Coracle press from the 1980s. So I created Filtow, a publishing house, to produce the book.

I decided to work with John Morgan studio, a nominee for the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year 2012. The brief was to make the most resolved and beautiful book we could.

The name Filtow comes from an essay by Marina Warner. She quotes the word in an article about my work, called The Colour of Time.

She writes: “Analytical philosopher Roy Sorensen proposes, by analogy with ‘shadow’ a new term, Filtow – a cast image through which light is filtered. It is not a shadow, because a shadow is made by an object blocking the ray of light, but rather a filtered radiance.”

Publishing is collapsing and distribution in decline. I felt disillusioned with the previous models I had worked with.

Yet, a well-conceived book should be greatly valued. Why abandon the idea of doing intelligent publications? This doesn’t offer a solution but it does allow a beautiful thing to come into the world.

Garry Fabian Miller is an artist. Home Dartmoor is at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, until 24 June