Finlay Mills - With This Breath
On Friday 20 October, Bath Spa University launched a photography exhibition and 100-page publication of work by Finlay Mills, titled ‘With This Breath’.
Finlay died on 25 March 2022, aged 31, following the diagnosis of a brain tumour in 2018.
With This Breath includes photographs that Finlay made during a period of turbulence and isolation for us all, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout this time, Finlay was also facing monumentally difficult personal health challenges, yet his creative drive was undiminished. His photographic work provided a space for him to experiment and to express the physical and emotional experience of his situation, with unique and extraordinary results.
Never half-hearted, he confronted questions of his own mortality and visualised his response to the medical interventions and care that he received with great courage and honesty. He used photography to channel these experiences and to connect them to other aspects of his photographic vision, through family archive, documentary narrative and self-representation.
During the first Covid lockdown, he made the most extraordinary body of photographic work in an effort to describe the claustrophobia of the pandemic restrictions. By exposing his film multiple times throughout the period, he created an enormous panorama of layered, multiple exposures that is overwhelming in its immersive density.
In the series Alive, Finlay documented the realities of his personal circumstances and his interactions with the medical processes and technologies involved in his treatment. He talked a lot about the nature of his condition and the photographic images that he was making to describe his own perspective on the medical and emotional challenges that he faced. It was an incredibly courageous and beautiful piece of work that was unflinchingly honest and deeply moving.
