Asher Milgate: The Sun … Is My Religion
October 11 - November 30, 2025
In The Sun … Is My Religion, Asher Milgate presents a body of work that enters into conversation with the legacy of Hans Heysen. It responds directly to Heysen’s reverence for sunlight and the eucalyptus landscape what he once described as “The Sun … Its Light and Warmth … Is My Religion” Milgate honours this devotion to light and the eucalyptus tree, while reframing it through a contemporary, critical practice rooted in post-colonial awareness, lived memory, and the materiality of process.
Milgate’s photographs begin as test prints: fragile, imperfect, often cast off. These are torn and machine-sewn into new compositions. The stitched seams do not attempt restoration. Instead, they insist on rupture, fragmentation, and remembrance. The gesture is material and political. Each image becomes a surface where time and tension are held in place.
Light, in Milgate’s practice, is not a romantic symbol. It is structural. It reveals what sits beneath. It brings attention to form, surface, and silence. It exposes hierarchies, clarifies the emotional residue of place, and challenges the viewer to recognise how history continues to shape what and how we see.
The Australian environment is not neutral in this work. It is charged with inheritance, relationship, and responsibility. Milgate engages with the settler condition not as a fixed position, but as an active memory structure, where built forms, family histories, and cultural legacies continue to influence perception and belonging.
This work is shaped by long-term creative relationships with First Nations artists and community members in Wellington, New South Wales. These relationships are not symbolic or conceptual. They inform the ethical grounding of Milgate’s practice, guiding how he sees, listens, and responds. His connection to place is intimate, but not proprietary. It asks what it means to remain aware, to stay accountable, to make space for memory and multiplicity.
Through black and white photography, paper, thread, and light, The Sun … Is My Religion inhabits the space between stillness and unrest. Between what is visible and what is withheld. Between history and the horizon. Like Heysen, Milgate is devoted to light—but here, it does not uplift. It invites deeper seeing. It offers no resolution, only the chance to begin again.
Asher Milgate, The Sun … Is My Religion, 2025, photographic image
Asher Milgate BIO
Asher Milgate (b. 1982) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, sound, and installation. Raised in regional New South Wales and now based in Melbourne, Milgate’s work is rooted in the quiet observation of place, memory, and material. His visual language is informed by a long-standing engagement with black and white photography and traditional darkroom processes, merged with interventions such as tearing, stitching, and chemical manipulation.
Milgate’s work is guided by a foundational principle: to listen and feel before capturing. His photographs act less as images and more as sites of encounter—where light, memory, and cultural responsibility intersect. Rather than seek resolution, his work opens space for reflection. These spaces often carry traces of lived histories, colonial legacies, and the marks of what has been built over or overlooked.
His practice is deeply grounded in relationship. Over two decades living and working in Wellington, NSW, Milgate developed enduring personal and creative connections with local First Nations artists and community members. These relationships are not symbolic references but lived entanglements that continue to shape his worldview, ethics, and visual practice.
Milgate’s artistic influences span from the documentary approaches of artists like Trent Parke to the material and conceptual provocations of Karla Dickens, Blak Douglas, and Brook Andrew. His works engage post-colonial frameworks while remaining poetic, intimate, and visually restrained. He treats light not as metaphor or atmosphere but as a structural force capable of revealing hierarchy, absence, and transformation.
His most recent body of work, The Sun … Is My Religion, responds to the legacy of Hans Heysen and his reverence for light and the Australian landscape. Using reconstructed photographic test prints, machine-stitching, and atmospheric exposures, Milgate reflects on light as both spiritual force and forensic tool.
Milgate’s work has been exhibited in institutional and independent spaces across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. He continues to explore how image-making holds memory, engage responsibility, and offer new modes of seeing.
Asher Milgate, Morialta Falls