Archive 2019/2020
Georgie Hill

The recipient of the 2019/2020 award is Georgie Hill

“Georgie Hill’s practice is quietly outrageous. Working in watercolour – not often seen in contemporary art – the artist consistently challenges the perceived vulnerability of the medium, through incising or perforating the paper, pushing the material to its limits. In this sense it is unique not just for its technical precision (which is acute), but for its commitment to forms of risk within that.

Architectural structures and interior spaces often appear in the work, led in part by the artist’s interest in less-visible histories of modernism – past work has referenced Eileen Gray, Frances Hodgkins, Charlotte Perriand and Lilly Reich. In more recent work there is a growing presence of the weather, the atmosphere, the climate, and the psychological effects of environmental instability in the present. There is the acid wash ground, evoking a storm, forms suggesting seismic pressure, and the marks of physical disturbance on the picture plane itself. Something huge is surely happening in this work; I'm excited to see how it develops. Georgie has always worked part-time, and I know the extended period of focused time made possible by this support will be immensely meaningful for this practice.”

– Curator for the 2019/2020 award, Abby Cunnane 

Adaptation Sequence (2), 2019
watercolour on incised paper
441 × 408mm

Installation view: Residence Within A Prism 
Bowerbank Ninow August 2019

Georgie’s most recent exhibition Residence within a Prism at Bowerbank Ninow, Gallery, 29 August to 21 September 2019, was accompanied by Andrew Clark's exhibition text:

Georgie Hill works thoughtfully and methodically, building her works piece by piece, as if assembling the complex inner workings of a finely-tuned instrument, either musical or scientific — or both. Hill’s works resemble diagrams, although their function is as much lyrical as it is schematic. Her work is perhaps best interpreted in terms of verbs, rather than adjectives, as a sequence of actions taken by the artist: directing, measuring, repeating, sensing, connecting, superimposing. Likewise, the way Hill’s works are made involves multiple layers of painting that react and respond to one another.

Her first layers are nebulous, chaotic fields of colour, resembling rain, clouds or other natural phenomena in their irregular, organic patterning. Next, Hill cuts into her heavy paper support with a blade, creating raised channels within which the paint flows, allowing her to render a second layer of sharply defined, precise linework while also bringing into play the raised edges of the incision. These lines are painted so that whenever they cross a tonal boundary in the background, their colour changes, injecting a self-reflexive, pseudo-random element to the work. Bahktin regards creativity as a fundamentally dialogic process, in which the artist speaks “in the language of another’s discourse,” and by doing so realises the potential of that other, makes them whole and brings forth the aesthetic object.¹ This is the multivalent, circuitous view of the artist’s role depicted in Hill’s works; the shifting, prophetic territories they offer the viewer are also the terrain of the creative process itself, absorbing and being absorbed by the inexorable tides of future events.

Hill cites as particular influences on her practice the works of Hilma af Klint and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, both early modernists who dealt with pure abstraction while that form of art was still in its infancy. Hill’s work evokes ideas such as communication systems, zones of force or influence, or schematic descriptions of complex systems, all of which could equally be applied to af Klint and Taeuber-Arp’s works. Hill shares with af Klint a concern with the dynamics that underpin human experience, perception and thought, a desire to unpick the threads of the pattern that make up the phenomenal world. Viewed through this prism, Hill’s works could likewise be interpreted as diagrams, schematics or plans. She casts the works in this light when she refers to their status as “approximations of future events” and “systems, trends or prophecies.” The idea of “prophecy” is a potent one, in this context, containing both the idea of temporal displacement — a statement out of time, communicating with the future in the same way that af Klint’s occultist abstractions, unseen during her lifetime, gained new currency almost a century later — and the idea of a received message alien to the listener but susceptible to interpretation and exegesis.

The titles of all but one work in this exhibition are drawn from Doris Lessing’s 1971 visionary novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell. This text is difficult to summarise, but hinges on the inner world of an amnesiac professor and uses science fiction and fantasy elements as a framework to explore metaphysical and spiritual concerns, as well humanity’s impact on the environment. Hill’s work is similarly concerned with the way large scale events are reflected in the microcosmic realms of thought, memory and dream. Having experienced the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, she has a first-hand understanding of the natural world’s potential for instability, and the way such events become internalised parts of private psychic landscapes. This connection between the broad and the intimate, between exteriority and interiority, is crucial to Hill’s work. In the newer paintings, elements suggesting weather maps point towards climate change as a source of this internalised anxiety or fear. The work deals with the way complex, chaotic realities are modelled and interpreted through rational systems, and the disconnect that can arise between map and territory in these situations.

By injecting an element of chance and reflexivity into her process, Hill empowers her works to question monovalent, singular visions of the future, instead offering images of networks, congruences, and affinities — opportunities for dialogue and exchange. By invoking the earliest phases of the modernist artistic revolution, when ideas about the role and nature of art and creativity were still plastic and malleable, Hill is perhaps signalling the merits of flux and uncertainty, and the need to internalise this kind of flexible thinking in order to cope with an ever-changing present.

1 Mikhail Bahktin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press, 1981), 347, cited in Deborah J. Haynes, Bahktin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14.

Pale Fictions (Viewpoint #2), 2013
watercolour and graphite on paper
452 × 385mm

Back to Back (Eileen Gray Non Conformist Chair with Ruhlmann Defenses Chair), 2013
watercolour and graphite on paper
397 × 330 mm

Georgie Hill – Curriculum vitae

Born Auckland, New Zealand, 1979 
Lives Auckland, New Zealand

Education
2001 – BFA Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland 

Images credit: Sam Hartnett.