Statement
Julie F Hill’s research-led practice responds to the vastness of nature as represented by modern science. Taking an expanded approach to photography, she creates sculptural prints and installations that explore conceptions of deep-space and cosmological time. Sculpture and photography are harnessed as intersecting methodologies for exploring these dimensions. Through her work she questions processes of scientific knowledge production and the technologies used in its construction.
The scale of her large and evolving sculptural print works such as Earth, Water, Night (2023–), Dark River (2018–20), Cave (2023) work towards the idea of ‘intimate immensity’: reworking data into sculptural, ‘affective spaces’ that afford an imaginative and bodily engagement with the viewer. Their forms often resemble uncanny geological and meteorological phenomena: The Earth’s deep time evidenced in its geology offers our closest approximation to the grand scales of the cosmos and its scales and orders beyond the human. Ideas of non-human agency are explored via artificial intelligence systems trained on vast astronomy datasets to conjure their own view of the cosmos (Through Machine & Darkness, (2018–21); the exploration of kinship structures of ‘minor bodies of the solar system’, such as asteroids, moons and cosmic dust (In the debris of planets (2021); The Chemical Kinship of Stony Entities (2021;25); as well as imagining alternative instruments to those offered by technoscience for coming to know the cosmos – for example, embroidery and sculptural works that explore water as the eye of the landscape, an alternative instrument for looking at time.
Through materiality she highlights the intimate connections and exchanges between the organic and the inorganic; life and non-life; earth and space. Through these intersections she aims to collapse distinctions between different temporal and spatial scales to connect with the ecological project of thinking beyond anthropocentricity, inspiring care and attention for the vast inorganic realm of rocks and stars.
Linked elements of writing, performance and cookery are often devised to accompany her installations.
Biography
Julie studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and was Fellow in Digital Print at the Royal Academy Schools (2017–20). She was selected for the Land Art Agency’s Sustainable Futures: Outer Space residency series where she was partnered with environmental anthropologist Dr Valerie Olson (2021). She was awarded the Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation as part of the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Royal Museums Greenwich (2020) with her work being exhibited at The National Maritime Museum (2020–21), Jodrell Banks (2021) and Fox Talbot Museum (2021–22). In 2019 she was awarded an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice grant for her project Through Machine & Darkness, looking at the use of AI in astronomy and was recently awarded a second for her research project First Contact which will see her create work in response to the Harvard Plate Stacks collection, Harvard College Observatory, further deepening her investigation into the intertwined practices of astronomy and photography and female contributions in this field. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo, group shows and residencies including: The Book of Sand, HS Projects (2024–); Seeing Stars, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, UK (2022); Sustainable Futures: Outer Space, Land Art Agency residency (2021); The AI Gallery, National Gallery, online (2021–); The Space Out of Time, Terminal Creek Contemporary / Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, CA (2019); In Search of Darkness, Lumen/Grizedale Sculpture (2018) and Single-Shot, Tate Britain, London, UK & touring (2007–11). She was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2025. In 2022–3 she was awarded an a-n Professional Development bursary.
She has been awarded funding for her artistic and curatorial projects including Passengers (2016–), a continuing site-specific exhibition series which looks at the social, historical and material contexts of various sites and architectures, as well as Cartographies of Life & Death, curated for Artakt, Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine that celebrated the work of physican John Snow who mapped the cholera epidemics of the late 1800s and was funded by a Wellcome Trust People’s Award and Arts Council England.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Harvard Plate Stacks and ESR Europe.