Jonathan Miles is a painter, writer and lecturer. He trained at the Slade School of Art (1969-73) developing practices relating firstly to performance, installation and video before shifting into the realm of politicised image and text works. In the late seventies, early eighties he was involved with ZG Magazine in both written and editorial capacity. In this period the art work utilised felt tip drawings on paper, often configured in the form of large scale letters (HIT) or simple vertical panels. This practice was abandoned and gradually a painting practice emerged but remained private out of a sense of aesthetic withdrawal. In this time a practice of fictional writing started to evolve and this featured as being a component part of his aesthetic presentation with exhibition form. The main idea of this practice is that both elements suspend the other within an indeterminate relationship such that a gap might appear as an in-between.

Invariably the paintings are in large groups that might then be composed as composite grids or even in piles. They are composed out of blurring the lines that might distinguish style, genre, abstraction or figuration and as such exist as metaphorically broken or confused sentences that lack clear punctuation. In this respect they stand aside of any claim, conceptual or otherwise, in order that they simply occur within the space of their own presentation.

The writing occupies several forms: catalogue essays, gallery introductions, aphoristic writing, lectures and short fictions. At times writing might be a hybrid of two or several forms but the play between the oral and the written is invariably in evidence. At present is involved in developing a ‘wiki’ site on aesthetic theory in the RCA, which in part evolved from the practice of running a reading group.