‘Who Cares Wins’ (2020) is part of Harland Miller’s ongoing series of paintings and prints based on the dust jackets of Penguin books. By combining the motif inherent in the Penguin book, Miller found a way to marry aspects of Pop Art, abstraction and figurative painting at once, with his writer’s love of text. The ensuing images are humorous, sardonic and nostalgic at the same time, while the painting style hints at the dog-eared, scuffed covers of the Penguin classics themselves. Miller continues to create work in this vein, expanding the book overs to include his own phrases, some hilarious and absurd, others with a lush melancholy.

… these words, ‘Who Cares Wins,’ when I first wrote them were about caring for people with dementia – specifically my Dad; and at the time the phrase worked like a 5 second pep talk to myself… to keep caring, because really – that’s all I could do… sitting here in my flat – nursing, I see from the lowering sun outside, it’s been a while since I wrote that last line… Caring is all we can do… and Caring for the Carers… is I imagine one of the ways we can do this best.
Harland Miller, 2020

Harland Miller is both a writer and an artist, practising both roles over a peripatetic  career in both Europe and America. After living and exhibiting in New York, Berlin  and New Orleans during the 80s and 90s, Miller achieved critical acclaim with his  debut novel, ‘Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty’ (2000); the story of a kid who  travels around northern England with a David Bowie impersonator; In the same  year he published a small novella, First I was Afraid, I was Petrified, based on the  true story of a female relative with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, discovered  when Miller came across a box full of Polaroid images she had taken of the knobs  of a cooker.

In 2001 Miller produced a series of paintings based of the dust  jackets of Penguin books. By combining the motif inherent in the Penguin book,  Miller found a way to marry aspects of Pop Art, abstraction and figurative painting  at once, with his writer’s love of text. The ensuing images are humorous, sardonic  and nostalgic at the same time, while the painting style hints at the dog-eared,  scuffed covers of the Penguin classics themselves. Miller continues to create work  in this vein, expanding the book covers to include his own phrases, some hilarious  and absurd, others with a lush melancholy. Miller was the Writer in Residence at  the ICA for 2002 and over the course of his residence he programmed a number  of events drawing from his experience in literature and fine art, which included a  season devoted to the ongoing influence and legacy of Edgar Allen Poe.

In 2008 Miller curated a group exhibition, ‘You dig the tunnel, I’ll hide the soil’ in  homage to Edgar Allen Poe, to mark the bicentenary of his birth. Staged across  two venues, White Cube Hoxton and Shoreditch Town Hall, Miller exhibited  several new works including an installation in Hoxton Square that deceived many  visitors. ‘I Was Always Good at Finding Things I’ comprises of seven forensic  figures in a cordoned off area, examining it for what appears to be evidence,  whether traces of a murder or something even more inexplicable, a sinister air is  apparent. Instead of the word POLICE, the blue and white tape says ‘THE TELLTALE HEART’, a classic short story by Poe where the assailant invites the police to  search the home for his victim, laying hidden under the floorboards. In the  following year Miller, turned to the police campaign mounted against the  infamous ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ in 1978 that had been misconstrued by the hoax  letters and tapes sent by John Samuel Humble a.k.a Wearside Jack from the  North East. For his exhibition at the BALTIC, Miller painted a series of large  billboards entitled ‘The Consequence of a Failed Illusion (West Yorkshire Police  Public Information Campaign)’ which, over time had been ripped to reveal adverts  catch-phrases and imagery amongst samples of Wearside Jack’s writing or  emergency number to call and listen to his voice.  Subsequent bodies of work continue Miller’s love of the vernacular. Drawing on  his extensive archive of psychology and social science books, a series of works  make formal references to the covers of these self-help manuals from the 60s  and 70s. More recently Miller has begun to restrict his phrases to mono or bisyllabic words often with multiple meanings, such as ‘ACE’, ‘LUV’ and ‘UP’ through hard-edged paintings that celebrate moments of humanity in popular  language. Inspired by medieval manuscripts, these works lend a sense of the  sacred to the everyday, something he further explores in his ‘Hell’ series where  bold colour compositions are underscored by a secondary text that brings a  sense of the everyday to the profound with often characteristic tragicomedy, as  with ‘Hell Don’t Make Me Come Down There’.

Harland Miller was born in Yorkshire, UK in 1964 and lives and works in London.

Solo exhibitions include York Art Gallery, York, UK (2020), Palacio Quintanar,  Segovia (2015) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK  (2009). Group exhibitions include Somerset House, London (2016); Sculpture  in the Close, Jesus College, Cambridge, UK (2013); Summer Exhibition, Royal  Academy of Arts, London (2005, 2006, 2007); Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany  (2004); and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1996). In 2008, Miller  curated the group show ‘You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide The Soil’ at White Cube  and Shoreditch Town Hall, London.