About

Contemporary British artist | 3D cut-paper sculptures & book-works

Born in Glasgow in 1938, William Milroy, always known as Jack, is a contemporary British artist whose distinguished career spans more than six decades and encompasses sculpture, collage, printmaking and mixed media.

He studied at Scarborough School of Art (1956–60) before continuing his education at the University of London (1960–61). Milroy later taught at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham, influencing generations of young artists, while maintaining an active presence within the London art world from the 1970s onwards.

Milroy is best known for his intricate three-dimensional cut-paper constructions and book-works, in which printed materials are transformed into complex architectural forms. Through processes of cutting, layering and reconstruction, he creates vast imagined worlds and sweeping themes, ranging from cataclysm to paradise. His work is marked by a combination of precision, structural rigour, a distinctive visual intelligence and a darkly playful humour.

He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, from the early exhibitions at Rotherham City Art Gallery in the 1960s followed by solo shows at Hester van Royen Gallery (1977), Glen Hanson Gallery, Minneapolis (1979), Scarborough Art Gallery (1987) and Stephen Lacey (1999. He had a long-standing collaboration with Art First, London from the late 1990s. His most recent exhibition was Post-Card Post-Book at Benjamin Rhodes Arts, 2025 and his forthcoming exhibition will be held at Shapero Modern, London, in April 2026.

Milroy has shown extensively in the UK and internationally. Solo shows include Hester van Royen Gallery (1977), Glen Hanson Gallery, Minneapolis (1979), Scarborough Art Gallery (1987), Stephen Lacey (1999), through numerous collaborations with Art First in London to recent showcases of new work such as Post-Card Post-Book at Benjamin Rhodes Arts, 2025. His upcoming exhibition is at Shapero Modern, London, in April 2026.

Milroy has participated in many group shows including The British Art Show, organised by the Arts Council (1980), The Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries (1999) and Catalyst at the Imperial War Museums North (2013).

His work is held in major public and private collections, including British Airways HQ, London, Chase Manhattan Bank, De Beers, the Imperial War Museum, the New British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

in his own words

Artists are for the most part notoriously reluctant to describe or explain, most of all to seek to justify, their own work. There are of course notable exceptions. Van Gogh and Delacroix spring immediately to mind, but even they fall into exceptional categories: the one of the intimate correspondence with a close friend, a colleague or, in this case, a brother; the other of the private notebook and journal, as it were the running conversation with oneself, or one’s peers. It is such essential intimacy that offers perhaps the clue, and reinforces the distinction: always the self-conscious, self-important public statement that is to be taken as suspect, and treated with studied care.

For the far from fanciful terror of the artist is that, by seeking to explain it, is at once to admit to inadequacy in the work to justify itself, and to constrain the work, and all its processes, to a specific programme and reading, thereby stripping it of all the excitement of uncertainty and intuitive discovery, and, most of all, its mystery. In short, to be so self-conscious is to cease to be an artist.

But the world at large is hungry for explanation and circumstantial detail, for why else would there be the critic, the curator, the journalist, the art historian, to offer a guiding hand, reassure, and get it wrong. And so it is we trap the artist into the more formal conversation of the interview, and hope our questions, on intentions, ideas, influences, meanings, will bring forth an ordered philosophy and ultimate enlightenment. The artist, on the other hand, is used to this by now, and will either play the philosophical game to leave us none the wiser – vide Francis Bacon stringing David Sylvester along – or fence such questions off with practicalities, principles and techniques, to the same effect. So the great comedy continues.