Asher Milgate’s photographic practice operates as an embodied enquiry into landscape, memory, and post- colonial legacy. His approach is shaped by four decades of relationship with the Wiradjuri community in Wellington, New South Wales. As an artist of Anglo-Celtic heritage, Milgate carries the weight of inherited colonial narratives, and his work reflects a quiet insistence on listening, accountability, and long-term cultural engagement.
Each print in The Sun… Is My Religion is handmade – torn, exposed, sewn, and reassembled. Not as gesture, but as method. The fibre-based silver gelatin paper holds not just an image, but memory made material, where silver and salt, shadow and stitch conspire to form something
both fragile and certain. These works become propositions rather than documents, holding tension between rupture and repair, testimony and silence, personal memory and collective history.
Materiality sits at the core. The matte paper evokes skin more than surface, a site of touch, trauma, and care. Each stitch is both mark and act, acknowledging matrilineal labour, industrial repetition and the photographic medium’s role in shaping how histories are recorded, circulated and reimagined.
From a distance, the compositions echo fractured aerial surveys – visual traces of land management and inherited systems of separation. This is deliberate. Through spatial metaphor and visual language, Milgate invites us to reconsider how land is perceived and whose stories are prioritised in that act of seeing.
While the exhibition draws its title from a quote by Hans Heysen, the work speaks to a wider lineage of artists who have reimagined the Australian landscape. Heysen’s reverence for light and gum trees provided Milgate’s early entry point, visceral and cultural alignment that offered a way in. David Hockney’s composite photography expanded his sense of how landscapes might be constructed. Blak Douglas’s political commentary underscores the power of visual art to confront settler narratives and center First Nations sovereignty.
Milgate’s practice moves beyond homage. It offers a grounded, personal lens shaped by lived responsibility, research, and relationship.
In this space, photography becomes a practice of witness, one that invites reflection and response.
Asher Milgate : The Sun… Is My Religion
Year: 2025
Medium: Fibre-based silver gelatin print, nylon thread, machine-stitched and perforated Edition: Unique Print (1/5)
Captured: 2020-2025
Date Printed: September 2025 Location Printed: Brunswick Darkroom, Naarm/Melbourne (Australia)
Signature: Hand-signed by the artist verso
www.ashermilgate.com
