Julie F Hill

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Parent Body Physically manipulated soy-ink print on tissue, chalk and clay pigments, chrome metal, water, clamp.
c. W3 × H2.2 × D2.5m. 2025.

Installation views: The Geological Unconscious, Hypha HQ, London. 2025.

Hill’s sculptural print installation Parent Body uses scanning electron microscope data of samples recently returned from asteroid Bennu. The data features details of carbon-rich and organic ‘nano-globules’ which are theorised as being ‘proto-cells’ and speak to astro-geological-biological material lineages across deep space and cosmological time. Sentience is evoked via Gaston Bachelard’s idea of water being the eye of the landscape. A drop of water falls into a pool on the ground, whose reflection extends the interior space of the sculpture into a hydrous, rippling mirror world: an eye at the stone’s interior, looking into its parent-body water world. (Current evidence suggests Bennu is a fragment of a larger, parent body water world). The cavernous formation invites a looking into – evoking the inner space of memory. In the sense that stony entities store a memory of deep, cosmic time, brain cells are perhaps not the only things that hold memories, or respond to stimuli or thought. The sculpture provides an embodied experience of the data and invites intimate contemplation of expanded scales. The ambiguous rock-like yet flowing forms echo the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’.

Hill's large-scale sculptural installations evolve and can adapt to various architectures and contexts.