Nicole Jean Hill

Artifacts and Incidents

January 6 - March 1, 2012

I create photographs along the periphery of rural communities in the western United States - the spaces nestled between national forest lands and private property or the easement zones along county roads and greenbelts. Existing as neither private nor public, these liminal spaces simultaneously imply autonomy and lawlessness. Without a clearly defined function, these borderlands are an overlap of unruliness and regulation. They contain evidence of the disruptive character of human activity, efforts at cultivation, and the inherent wildness of an environment.

My photographs are of subtle and aggressive relationships within the natural world. They document the natural movement of land, disturbances within its contours, and discarded objects contained within. The source of action that has defined or altered a site or object is often unclear.

Within each frame and throughout the series, the familiar and the ominous coexist. My goal is to create implied narratives of the orderly and untamable. It is through this visual investigation that I question the nature of nature and the desire to define the boundaries between the knowable and unpredictable landscape.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Nicole Jean Hill was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. She received a BFA in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, including Gallery 44 in Toronto, the Australia Centre for Photography in Sydney, and the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been featured in the Magenta Foundation publication Flash Forward: Emerging Photography from the U.S., U.K., and Canada, the Humble Art Foundation’s The Collector’s Guide to Emerging Photography, and National Public Radio. Hill has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah, the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon. She currently resides in Humboldt County, California and is an Associate Professor of Art at Humboldt State University. https://www.nicolejeanhill.com/