This striking black and white photograph captures three delicate feathers against a dark background. The visual elements highlight the intricate textures and ethereal forms of the feathers, which are rendered in high contrast. The subject matter appears to be a minimalist study of natural forms, inviting the viewer to closely examine their intricate details. The artistic style and technique suggest a modernist or conceptual approach, likely employing photographic methods to isolate and emphasize the inherent beauty of these simple, organic elements. The overall effect is one of aesthetic contemplation, encouraging the viewer to consider the captivating nature of these humble, yet remarkable feathers. ...
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. ...
