Susan Hiller
Born – New York City, USA 1942
Until Susan Hiller experienced a “kind of crisis of conscience” she studied as an anthropologist. Through her work as an artist she investigates the significance of common experience and cultural artefacts and explores the process of the imagination. Since the late 1960s Hiller has worked in a variety of media, paintings, sculpture, instillations, photography, audio and video works. She has lived in London since 1973. Memorial plaques, postcards, wallpaper and photo-booth portraits became the materials by which she investigates the gaps between dreams and real experience, the unspoken and unrecorded word. Death, desire and language are major themes. Midnight Euston is a piece which defines the artist, as subject, in terms of time and space. The booth becomes a mini-theatre where Hiller re-enacts herself with the camera as her mirror. Hiller combines the elements of the face together with automatic writing, at the same time she is obliterating and embellishing it with an indecipherable message. She has developed the notion of signals communicated by language into dramatic audio-visual installations, which surround the spectator in unknown territory, allowing them to participate as creator of their own narrative.
Masterpieces:
- Belshazzar’s Feast
- An Entertaining
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.