Miller’s ceramic practice engages clay as both material and concept. Drawing on its historical association with the creation of the human form, his work explores the relationship between the body and the vessel, treating ceramic form as a site of knowledge, repair, and representation.
Across his work, questions of medical history and visual culture are approached through material process. Form, surface, and scale are used to consider how bodies have been constructed, interpreted, and remembered.
Cowrie Series
The Cowrie Series (2025-present) investigates how materials carry cultural memory. Historically circulating as currency across parts of Africa and the diaspora, the cowrie shell holds multivalent associations with value, exchange, protection, and fertility.
In this series, the shell becomes both form and symbol. Reinterpreted through ceramic process, it serves as a site of generative potential — where repetition and abstraction open questions about how meaning accumulates across time and place.
Scarification Series
The Scarification Series (2025) emerged from research into Yoruba and Dinka traditions of scarification — and their shared imperative to mark maturation deliberately on the body. Rather than reproducing specific cultural patterns, the series develops its own visual language on the vessel surface, treating clay as a site of recorded knowledge.
The works ask what it means to mark a body — ceramic or human — at a moment of transformation, and how that marking becomes both archive and declaration of becoming.