Atalanta Arden Miller (b. 1996, UK) is a British sculptor and painter. After studies at Oxford University, she received her MFA in sculpture at the New York Academy of Art, where she received the David Schafer Portrait Award and was awarded the Leipzig Summer Residency in Leipzig, Germany. On graduation, at 21, she became the school’s youngest Fellow. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Atalanta’s work explores the nature of home and biography and is influenced by stagecraft and the world of theatre. She says: “I’m a storyteller, working in painting, drawing and sculpture. Having been raised in a household of scientists, I need the stories I tell to anchor to reality. But the anchor chain needs to be long - I’m contrarian by nature. I love facts: documented ones, like strange historical occurrences, weird bits of biology, or visual ones, like Andreas Mantegna’s obsessive need for order. Each painting coalesces after a great hoovering up of information, from books, films, poetry, gym talk.”

As a child, Atalanta loved wilderness-survival novels, which detailed the step-by-step methods through which an individual could impose some semblance of order on their environment – whittling twigs into needles, twisting twine into rabbit snares, stitching together a rabbit-skin hat with gut string. She made “Into the woods” thinking about those novels, the methodical patience with which the characters approached the enigmatic tangle of nature. The style of this painting is plain-spoken, and the forest sparse, but it still holds its mysteries. It takes it’s art historical starting point from Pieter Breughel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’ (1565), one of Atalanta’s favourite paintings. 

selected works