Terry Miles interview 2001.

Terry Miles Interview 2001.

SILVIE:
How has your visual impairment influenced your work?

TM:
As far as my paintings go I don't think of it as being an influence it is more of a problem when it comes to detail or even reading what the pigment is on a tube of paint. Sometimes I will use photographs and enlarged photocopies of an image to help me with detail. If I am working on a landscape I will walk up and down a line to see the subject better. When I am drawing or painting a still life I will sometimes use a magnifying glass to see detail and texture more clearly. Sometimes there is an exaggeration in the perspective - this can happen on an object I am close to - I was once drawing a well with water-lilies growing in it. There was a curve to the well in the drawing.

When I am writing poetry that I want to read myself at readings I try to keep them fairly short. I have to be able to half read and half remember them - I use a visual aid when I am giving a public reading. The longer prose monologues I have to ask someone else to read. When they are read as I intended them to be read I am pleased. It is also interesting because I hear them as interpretations. As for subject matter I don't select it on the grounds that I am visually impaired. There are still more visual references than there are of sounds, smells or textures.

In the two plays that I have recently completed, 'Power Cut' & 'Pearl', I have written about visual impairment. Power cut was criticized on a number of grounds - so I wrote 'Pearl' using the criticism as the subject matter for the re-write of the play. Writing a play about visual impairment became one of the themes. The re-write became another play - I now consider them to be a double bill. In one sense I don't think I was blind enough to write a play for a blind, visually impaired and sighted audience. I don't think one of the plays could be performed without the other.

I think I have an instinctive feel for composition. When I take photographs I compose the picture in the lens and then again in the darkroom if I have to - after all the proportions of the negative have nothing to do with a photographers decision making process. I usually take a number of shots of the same subject - just in case there is something in one that I haven't noticed - something that might spoil the image. This might entail moving around. I am more concerned with thinking in terms of colour or black and white than I am with whether my visual impairment is influencing me. If I haven't photographed something because I haven't noticed it then it is not something I have missed because I didn't know it was there in the first place. It is a waste of time to dwell on these things. There is still plenty for me to see.