Garry Fabian Miller is a photographer who works without a camera. It may seem a contradiction in terms, but you could see it as the essence of the photographic art, reminiscent of the early exploratory days of the genre. Since the 1980s, Miller’s method is – or has been – to shine light through glass vessels or paper cut-outs directly on to light-sensitised paper.

His images are a distillation of light, an attempt to capture it on paper with no intermediary equipment. When Cibachrome light-sensitive paper, crucial to Miller’s process, was discontinued in 2013, the artist stockpiled his own personal supply at home on Dartmoor, creating new work until it ran out in 2016.

Then, like much of the rest of the photographic world, Miller was forced by circumstance to go digital, something which he has embraced by working collaboratively with digital master printers in an attempt to capture that same deep luminescence in new ways.

This new exhibition at Dovecot is a one-room affair, although there is plenty to draw the eye and the mind. The centrepiece is a new tapestry, Voyage into the Deepest, Darkest Blue, designed by Miller and created by the Dovecot master weavers over nine months.

The tapestry itself is the striking presence in the room. The lower half a crucible of orange and yellow, the upper a strata of purples and deep blues, it seems to both exude and absorb light. But the fact that it is so vibrant is in itself a victory for the medium, for the trouble with creating something whose source is “made” from light, in tapestry, says one of the weavers, is that wool itself absorbs light.

There is more on Miller’s development, on the history, on the walls, from an insightful look at his early photographic series, Sections of England: Sea Horizons (1976), his first major work, to a rare print by pioneering Victorian photographer Gustave Le Gray, who created a sensation by splicing together two images to form a sea and sky-scape that highlighted both sections rather than favouring either sea or sky, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. More than a century later, Miller’s work is a direct echo of it.

Miller is fascinated, Dovecot curator Kate Grenyer tells me, by the work of other craftspeople. Perhaps this is part of the attraction, for in the process of collaboration between artist and weaver – for his own art, once hewn in a darkroom, is a craft, as Miller tells it – new work is born. New processes are integrated, new understandings

reached.

“It’s been a long and interesting process, working with Garry,” says Grenyer. With a developing interest in tapestry, Miller had visited Dovecot a number of times before both parties approached each other with ideas for creating a tapestry.

As Dovecot already had a series of big commissions on the looms in 2013, the proposal had to be put on the backburner. But, eager to start the collaborative process, artist and tufters started work on a series of rugs – essentially hearth rugs with flaming supernovas as the central motif – which can now be seen in the foyer of Standard Life Aberdeen in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh.

“They’re one of our most popular editions of rugs,” says Grenyer, who curated an exhibition with Miller in 2015 called Dwelling, based on these rugs and Miller’s interest in Winifred Nicholson’s rug-making.

This is a work of two halves, in concept if not in realisation, for Miller spliced together two photographs on a central “horizon line” to create the image – Voyage into the Deepest, Darkest Blue (2016) – upon which this work is based. The dark ends suddenly at the light – although there is a luminescence, too, in the blues – a skein of aquamarine skimming the “horizon”, coalescing the two halves into colours of rich saturation, finely and subtly blended, that took multiple sample dyings and weavings to perfect before the final colours were chosen. Unlike in a pictorial scheme, where a weaver might occasionally weave in an unforeseen flash of colour, or where the image itself might be a little forgiving around the edges, there was no room for error.

Grenyer says: “There had to be some very careful and precise weaving. It’s an incredibly long process of subtle colour blending, which takes a particular kind of concentration – quite meditative in the proper sense of the word, an intense focus away from the rest of the world.”

The tapestry itself had to be woven as one piece – there is no other way. In total, five weavers worked on it.

As the lower half was woven, the coloured weft thread woven through the plain warp, the completed sections were rolled underneath, with no more than a foot of the work being seen at any one time.

The cutting-off ceremony, when the tapestry was literally cut off the loom, the work unrolled, was breathtaking, says Grenyer. “You never get the whole picture when you’re working on it,” she says.

Garry Fabian Miller: Voyage, Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, 0131 550 3660 www.dovecotstudios.com, until 7 May,

Mon-Sat, 10.30am-5.30pm

Critic's Choice:

Innovative applied arts take over at Pier this month as the Jerwood Makers Open Exhibition returns to Stromness for the second time in five years.

Five early-career makers, all within the first ten years of establishing their practice, were chosen from 271 applicants for the sixth Jerwood Makers Open in late 2016 and commissioned to make work for this exhibition.

Artist Clare Twomey, part of the selection panel, calls the winners “very exciting… this group of artists are intrepid in their endeavour to explore ideas through material relationships”.

The artists chosen were Marcin Rusak, Juli

Bolanos-Durman, Laura Youngson Coll, Jessica Harrison and Sam Bakewell, for whom the award has supported further experimentation in their craft.

The work, currently arriving in the gallery for installation, is diverse. Bakewell is a ceramicist who has used the commission to further his practice with wood, working with a chainsaw and chisel to create abstracts that reference historic carving.

Rusak works in organic substances such as beeswax and “waste flowers” that slowly degrade to pose questions about both history and future.

Bolanos-Durman creates “objets d’art” out of ordinary things, here using found and blown glass to create a large installation.

Harrison has worked on a body of porcelain objects that question the notion of a collection.

And Youngson Coll, with experience in bookbinding and leatherworking, has created a piece on calf vellum that explores the crossroads between personal experience of illness and scientific explanation of the same.

Jerwood Makers Open Exhibition, Pier

Arts Centre, Victoria Street, Stromness, Orkney, 01856 850 209 wwwpierartscentre.org, 24 Mar-9 Jun,

Tues-Sat, 10.30am-5pm

Don't Miss:

If you are within striking distance of Kelso, don’t miss the Borders Art Fair this weekend, bringing together all things art under one roof. Galleries and artists from the Borders and further afield will showcase their best works, from the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh to the Hirsel Gallery in Coldstream, alongside many individual artists in all media. There are demonstrations and workshops where you can learn to “paint like Peploe” or hone your seascapes. If you prefer theory rather than practice, you can listen to talks on subjects as diverse as the new V&A Dundee (Philip Long) and the past 100 years of the Scottish art market (Guy Peploe).

Borders Art Fair, Springwood Park, Kelso, Scottish Borders, www.bordersartfair.com, until 18 March, daily 10am-4pm