Betty Miller grew up in the mining towns of Yorkshire. Her parents were professional photographers and many of her childhood memories are of life in their studio and shop. Her father, JL Wood, photographed the Yorkshire mines during the 1920s an 1930s, an often dangerous endeavour, one of his most famous images was taken while strapped to planks of wood balanced across the top of a mine-shaft with his photograph taken looking down the shaft. Such was the renown of his work that it was exhibited at the National Mining Museum of Great Britain during 2006, 65 years after his death. His photographs were exhibited alongside a major project of Betty’s, My Village, which expressed her memories of life at the time. Betty describes this as “a narrative in bronze of remembered images from my childhood in Royston, Yorkshire, then a coal-mining village. My father was a photographer and my sculptures have an illusionary quality, like photographs seen through a stethoscope. From some viewpoints they are fully ‘in the round’, from others they become almost two-dimensional.”

Betty Miller trained in London at The Borough Polytechnic and Goldsmiths’ College.