Concepts and Key Themes
Tracy Hill explores how digital technology and the traditional analogue processes of print and drawing can combine to offer new ideas about place and ways of understanding landscape and the changing environment. Using printed works on paper and installation her work considers opposing views, which exist between the cultures of the Northern and Southern hemispheres around wayfaring, navigation and meaningful connection to place through walking.
Decoded and reimagined images captured using geomatics technology create installations challenging our increasing dependence on digital information, questioning how it changes our human experience and engagement with place.
Working closely with environmental agencies and by working within a culture of inter-disciplinary activity Tracy Hill demonstrates that collaborative opportunities promote and rearrange knowledge. Her artworks offer new perspectives to the fields of geography, archaeology and environment conservation, employing analogue processes to give a visibility to the aesthetics of materials and investment of time given during creation.
Hill’s cross-disciplinary practice investigates and reconsiders the relationship between our developing digital capabilities and the aesthetics of the traditional hand created mark.
The intersection between our digital and aesthetic worlds is where Hill situates her art works: a hybrid space where technological control meets emotion and memory of the human experience of Landscape.
Perceptions of mapping, digital navigation and how we encounter our urban and rural spaces connect with a modern obsession for locating, ordering and fragmenting our experiences. Through combinations of print, installation and hand drawn imagery Hill invites a new perspective to these landscapes. Disrupted and reimagined images create an opportunity to explore what is beyond a 2d surface becoming a visualisation of the point where our physical and digital worlds overlap, the edge between our world and how we feel to be part of it.
Artist’s Bio
The intersection between our aesthetic and digital worlds is where Hill situates her art works: a hybrid space where a geological understanding of the land informs an embodied experience of the energy contained within it. The walking body acting as conduit, connecting traditional beliefs and customs, rhythms and vibrations exploring spaces which resist being fully understood or contained without challenging our usual perception, imagination and human timescales.
Hill proposes that to reconnect with place we must first reconnect and understand the experience, knowledge and memory of the physical encounter.
Combinations of drawing, print and installation create an opportunity to explore what is beyond a 2d surface becoming a visualisation of the point where our physical and digital worlds overlap, the edge between our world and how we feel to be part of it.
Tracy Hill is joint research lead/coordinator of Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, which tests the relevance of printmaking in contemporary, mainstream art by innovation and expanding print practice through a process of continuing collaborative dialogues with artists. Tracy’s specific interests investigate the possibilities of digital technologies and the aesthetics of the traditional hand created mark.Exhibiting nationally and internationally with notable awards including, The European Printmaking prize (SMTG Krakow 2018) Awagami Paper award (2017) and RBSA Print Biennial prize (2016). Contributions to publications including ‘Thinking the Sculpture Garden, Art, Plant, Landscape’, Penny Florence; Proximity and Distance in Northern Landscape Photography Contemporary Criticism, Curation and Practice, Darcy White / Chris Goldie;
Living Maps Review, No 7, Lines of Desire; Grabado Y Edición / Print and Website
full CV