Susan Hiller
Susan Hiller. Photo: Ian Franco
She began her artistic career in London in the early 1970s, when she first became known for an innovative artistic practice including group participation works such as Dream Mapping (1974); museological/archival installations such as Fragments (1978), Enquiries/Inquiries (1973 & 1975) and Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972/6); and many other works in a range of media exploring automatic writing, ESP, photomat machines, wallpaper, postcards and other denigrated aspects of popular culture. The common denominator in all her works is their starting point in a cultural artefact from our own society. Her work is an excavation of the overlooked, ignored, or rejected aspects of our shared cultural production, and her varied projects collectively have been described as investigations into the 'unconscious' of culture. Her stature has been recognised by midcareer retrospectives at London's Institute of Contemporary Art (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996) as well as by numerous solo exhibitions and the sounds of the landscape and to the life of a specific geographic area.
