Pati Hill was an American writer and photocopy artist known for her observational style of prose and her work with the IBM photocopier.
22 Facts About Pati Hill
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Pati Hill moved to Charlottesville, Virginia with her mother at age eight.
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For several years in the late 1980s, Pati Hill owned an antiques shop in Mystic, Connecticut.
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In 1960 after her two previous marriages, Pati Hill married French gallerist Paul Bianchini, known for bringing attention to postwar artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg.
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Pati Hill was widowed in 2000 when Bianchini died of cancer.
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Pati Hill died in her home in Sens, France on September 19,2014.
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At age 19, Pati Hill moved to New York where she worked as a model for the John Robert Powers Agency.
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Pati Hill modeled throughout her twenties and occasionally modeled for photographer and close friend Diane Arbus before withdrawing from fashion to retire to the French countryside.
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In Paris, Pati Hill contributed six short stories and an essay entitled "Cats" to The Paris Review in addition to an interview with Truman Capote.
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In 1962, Pati Hill began collecting informational art and objects as a housekeeper, which would become the subjects of her earliest works on the photocopier.
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Pati Hill cited two experiences as her inspiration for experimenting with the photocopier.
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In one of her accounts, Pati Hill accidentally copied her thumb while attempting to copy documents and was introduced to the potential of the copier.
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In 1975, Pati Hill published Slave Days, a book of 29 poems paired with photocopies of small household objects.
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In 1976, Pati Hill published another novel, Impossible Dreams, illustrated by photocopies of 48 photographs taken by photographers such as Robert Doisneau and Ralph Gibson.
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Pati Hill used the photocopier to appropriate photographs in her work Men and Women in Sleeping Cars, a visual narrative sequence, in 1979.
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In 1977 on a flight from Paris to New York, Pati Hill encountered designer Charles Eames and showed him some of the work she made on the copier.
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Pati Hill formally introduced her to IBM, who presented Hill with an IBM Copier II on loan for two and a half years.
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Pati Hill did not view her prints as representations nor reproductions of physical objects, but she instead considered her prints as objects in and of themselves.
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Pati Hill presented the machine with a degree of autonomy, explaining,.
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SpaceshipPati Hill used the copier to negotiate the relationship between words and images.
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In 1979, Pati Hill published Letters to Jill: A catalogue and some notes on copying, which acts as a "jargon-free primer" on the photocopier as an artist's tool.
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Pati Hill intended to have several exhibitions of her Versailles work, including shows titled Weeds, Worms, Water and Popsicle Sticks, Stone and Iron, Walls and Words, and Lace and Glass.