Jeremy Millar Presents 'Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows)'

As the title may suggest to some, this work is an assemblage of two prior works: the photograph Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) by Hippolyte Bayard, and 'The Willows' (1907), a short story by Algernon Blackwood. In this story (considered by HP Lovecraft the greatest supernatural story ever written) a man is found drowned and marked with small funnel-shaped indentations - 'That awful mark!' - made by an unknown supernatural being; the title of Bayard's photograph (considered by some the first conceptual art photograph) suggested the identity of the unfortunate victim.

With thanks to Grant Mason FX, Glasgow. Commissioned by CCA, Glasgow.

Jeremy Millar (b.1970) is an artist living in Whitstable, and tutor in art criticism at the Royal College of Art, London. His recent solo exhibitions include M/W, Muzeum Stzuki, Lodz; XDO XOL, Whitstable Biennale; Chandelier, London; The Oblate, Southampton City Art Gallery (2013); Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts, CCA, Glasgow; and Mondegreen (with Geoffrey Farmer), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (both 2011); As Witkiewicz, Ethnographic Museum, Krakow (2010); Given, National Maritime Museum, London; and Projector, Ikon, Birmingham (both 2009-10); Plum Tree Blossom, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2007).

Recent group exhibitions include Curiosity: Art and the Pleasure of Knowing (curated by Brian Dillon), Turner Contemporary, Margate, then touring to Norwich and Amsterdam; The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old (curated by Tom Morton), The Collection, Lincoln; and Mythographies (curated by Roy Brand), Yaffo23, Jerusalem (all 2013); The Future's Not What It Used To Be, Chapter, Cardiff; The Associates, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Membra Disjecta for John Cage, MQ, Vienna, then touring to DOX, Prague, and GVUO, Ostrava (all 2012); Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) (curated by Simon Starling), Camden Arts Centre, London (2010-11); Sculpture of Space Age (curated by Raimundas Malasauskas), David Roberts Art Foundation, London; The Dark Monarch - Magic and Modernity in British Art (curated by Michael Bracewell, Martin Clark, and Alun Rowlands), Tate St Ives (both 2009).

He conceived Every Day is a Good Day for Hayward Touring, the largest exhibition to date of the visual art of John Cage, which opened at Baltic in June 2010, and has curated many exhibitions nationally and internationally, including The Institute of Cultural Anxiety - Works from the Collection, ICA, London, (1994); Speed, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and The Photographers' Gallery, London, (1998); and was co-curator, with Barbara London, of escape, Media_City Seoul (2000).

Millar has also written numerous catalogue essays and published in magazines and newspapers such as Frieze, Art Monthly, and The Guardian; his most recent book is The Way Things Go (Afterall Books, 2007) on the film by Fischli and Weiss.