Julie F Hill: Cavern

About

Julie F Hill’s work responds to the vastness of nature as represented by modern science. Taking an expanded approach to photography and image-making, she creates sculptural installations that explore conceptions of deep-space and cosmological time. Using sculptural processes, scientific imaging software and code she reshapes astronomical data into uncanny phenomena, creating immensities that we can walk amongst, and enter into. Enigmatic and illusory materials act as conduits or portals, inviting us to cross a threshold to experience the unknowable. Through such environments she questions scientific images and the technologies used to construct them.

For Glass Cloud, Hill likens the window gallery to the void of a subterranean cavern. Its folded recesses are sculpted from scientific images of deep space along with stalagmites – reminiscent of scientific core samples – that rise from the floor. Astronomical images – registering wavelengths beyond what the eye can see – often invoke uncertain geologies: geological time or ‘deep-time’ being our nearest approximation to the grand scales of the cosmos. In this sense, Cavern represents the idea of thought collapsing on itself as it approaches its perceptual limit, attempting to comprehend the cosmos.

About Julie F Hill

Julie studied at Central Saint Martins (BA, 2004) and the Royal College of Art (MA, 2006), and is currently a Fellow in digital print at the Royal Academy Schools (2017–). In 2019 she was invited to Canada to take part in the Capture Photography Festival with a residency and solo exhibition The Space Out of Time at Terminal Creek Contemporary. Other solo and duo exhibitions include Of Stars and Chasms, with Hannah Luxton at ArthousSE1, London (2019); Deserts on the moons of other planets, Passengers, London, UK (2017); Single-Shot, Tate Britain, London, UK (touring exhibition, 2007). She is currently the recipient of an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice Grant for her project Through Machine & Darkness working with artificial intelligence algorithms and astronomical datasets.