Pati Hill was born in 1921 in Ashland, Kentucky. After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to «stop writing in favour of housekeeping.’’

If it is true that she published no work for thirteen years, Hill continued to write: poems and a diary. She also opened an antique shop. But above all it was during this period that Hill began her first plastic experiments with a photocopier, which she began to use, untrained as an artist, as an artistic tool to explore the relationship between image and text. In 1974, Hill publishes a collection of poems with an unambiguous title, Slave Days, in which her first works appear: xerographs of household objects that seem to float in indistinct space. By using the copier—a machine that was stereotypically linked to secretarial work and thus to feminized labor—to trace everyday objects such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men’s trousers, or a child’s toy, Hill develops an artistic practice that programmatically translates invisible domestic labor into a visual and public language. Through her use of this reproductive apparatus, she creates a model of artistic production that critically opposes the convention of individual expression as well as the supposed neutrality of technologically produced images.

At fifty, Pati Hill began a career as an artist which led her to exhibit in France and the United States, creating a considerable body of work, over nearly 40 years, made up of thousands of photocopies, texts and drawings. When she died in 2014, a part of her archive was transferred to Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Air De Paris

Ashland

Berlin

Sweetwater

Barcelona

Bombon Projects

Romainville

London

Lisson Gallery

Paris

Galerie Toner - Paul Bianchini

New York City

Essex Street

Galerie Texbraun

Gallery Modena

Kornblee Gallery

Frac Île-de-France, Les Réserves

Centre Pompidou

Le Bal

Freiburg

Museum für Neue Kunst

Amsterdam

Kunstverein Amsterdam

Whitney Museum of American Art

Brussels

Ortega y Gasset Projects

Stedelijk Museum

Musée D'Art Moderne De Paris

Cooper Hewitt

UNESCO

Frac Île-de-France Le Plateau

Treize

Zürich

Kunsthalle Zurich

Munich

Kunstverein München

New London

Lyman Allyn Museum

Sens

Musée de Sens

Versailles

Musée Lambinet

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Pati Hill

Untitled (scissors)

Untitled (asparagus)

Untitled (glasses)

Untitled (feathers)