Pati Hill was an American writer and artist who made extensive photocopy work and publications over a period of forty years beginning around the early 1970's (b. 1921, in Ashland, Kentucky, USA; d. 2014 in Sens, France)
“Sometimes when things are looking up and the weather is invigorating I am overcome by delusions of grandeur and I think it’s a miracle I am still locked into my daily round of household chores, unknown to the world of art, and when this happens I am overjoyed. By myself and by my life, as if that life were a palpable thing — a creature or a treasure I alone possess — and I am filled with gratitude for my freedom, my mobility and the way no one cares where I go or what I think and I tell myself I will one day look back on this spate of time of trying and failing and being committed and know I was happy as clearly as I now know I am coming to an end of it.”
Published by Printed Matter on occasion of the exhibition Pati Hill: My old fur coat doesn’t know me, this booklet excerpts Hill’s unpublished journal The History of Dressmaking, which she wrote between 1972 and 1977. The last chapter of the text, “High in the Sky,” captures Hill’s life ten years after she claimed to “quit writing in favor of housekeeping,“ reflecting on photocopying as well as her time in Stonington (Connecticut), Paris, and a small countryside village with her husband Paul Bianchini and their young daughter. Hill portrays herself and her life—in her distinctive cynical yet tender style—amongst a crowd of picturesque characters: her farmer neighbors in Cerisiers, her husband’s family with whom she experiences the French haute bourgeoisie with a mix of fascination and scorn, and her dog Lucas, who leads her to ponder the platonic nature of emotions.
Between 1953 and 1962, following a successful career as a model, Hill published five books and several short stories. After the birth of her only child she claimed to “quit writing in favor of housekeeping” and began a thirteen-year period that she later described laconically on her resume with the words: “Housewife, mother.” She was fifty-four when she exhibited for the first time works she had started to make with the photocopier a few years earlier. Initially motivated by an impulse to record the household items at her disposal with photocopiers at local copy shops, Hill pushed the medium in more experimental directions with the assistance of a loaned IBM Copier II that was installed in her home in 1977. Over the next four decades, Hill would go on to produce thousands of prints across different series, along with a catalog of hybrid projects focusing on how text and images might “fuse to become something other than either.”
Hill’s approach to the work was clarified in her own writings—often marked by dark and deadpan humor—picturing herself as a kind of engineer dealing with technique, language, and visual information as a whole, rather than an artist or a writer. Her foregrounding of ambiguity was certainly a way to avoid deforming her subject, as we sometimes “destroy dreams by choosing wrong words for them.” As someone who was often frustrated by the systems of power, dependency and status to which she belonged, it may have also been a way for her to consider doors to exit her narrative, “to [slip] away to [her] next incarnation, as easily as an eel off a china plate.”
Softcover, 64 pages, sewn-bound, digital black and white printing, 13.5 x 19cm, New York, 2023.
