Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller was an American-born conceptual artist whose artistic practice encompassed installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books, and writing.

Biography of Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1940 but was raised primarily in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1950, her family relocated to Coral Gables, Florida, where she attended Coral Gables Senior High School and graduated in 1957.

She furthered her education at Smith College, earning a B.A. in 1961. After spending a year in New York City studying photography, film, drawing, and linguistics, Hiller pursued post-graduate studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship. She completed her Ph.D. in 1965.  

After residing in France, Wales, Morocco, and India for a period, Hiller established herself in London in the late 1960s. During this time, she cultivated a pioneering artistic practice characterized by its diverse use of media and performance-based elements.

Hiller's debut exhibition took place at Gallery House in London in 1973, which she organized alongside her friends Barbara Ess and Carla Liss. At the exhibition, she showcased two of her works.

She also left a significant impact as an educator, mentoring a younger generation of British artists. Critic Louisa Buck recognized her as one of the central figures in the emergence of the young British artists' movement in the UK during the 1990s. Throughout the 1980s, she taught at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Hiller passed away in London in 2019, following a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Susan Hiller's Art Style

Over a span of 40 years, Susan Hiller cultivated a multimedia practice that positioned her as one of the most influential artists of her generation. Pioneering the innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos, and audio works garnered international acclaim. Each of Hiller's creations is rooted in specific cultural artifacts from our society, serving as foundational materials for her art. Many of her pieces delve into the liminality of various phenomena, such as automatic writing, near-death experiences, and collective encounters with unconscious, subconscious, and paranormal activity.

Drawing from minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism, her study of anthropology, and feminism, Hiller cited these as major influences on her work.

Throughout her career, Hiller gained recognition for her utilization of everyday phenomena and cultural artifacts from society that were often overlooked, denigrated, or marginalized. These included postcards, dreams, Punch & Judy shows, reports of UFO sightings, horror movies, bedroom wallpapers, street signs, ceramics, and extinct languages. Employing techniques of collecting, cataloging, presentation, and display, she transformed these ordinary ephemera into artworks that serve as a means to explore the inherent contradictions in collective cultural life, as well as the individual and collective unconscious and subconscious.

The artist coined the term 'paraconceptual' to describe her practice, positioning her work between the conceptual and the paranormal.