The Artist Questionnaire / № 1 / Ian Hill
How would you describe the artwork that you make?
I work in a combination of images and text. I am a photographer and writer, and produce printed works which combine creative writing with black-and-white analogue images. My themes are around place and our relationship with the land, and an attempt to re-engage emotionally with a world which feels to be slipping rapidly out of control.
I sometimes publish work online, often in the format of electronic zines which can be read like a book, but I prefer to publish hard copies of zines; I have a love of the physical artefact, and this approach seems to suit the analogue nature of my work.
Why do you make the work that you make?
I have written, and taken photographs, since I was very young. In both cases, I think now that, for me, they were some way of interpreting the world I perceived around me. I have long been fascinated by myths and stories, and I believe that my artistic work is a way of creating a personal mythology as a way of understanding landscape, place, and how we as humans interact with the natural world. I feel compelled to express the ways in which I grapple to understand the world, and my work represents an attempt to do that within the bounds of the media with which I feel most comfortable.
But beyond that is the compulsion to express feelings of despair or fear or confusion about the ways in which our world is changing; to try to express, albeit obliquely, climate change, the loss of habitats, the small ways in which landscape becomes less central to our lives.
Can you tell us about your creative process? What are the most significant practical, material, intellectual, and/or emotional processes that drive your practice?
Until relatively recently, I had pursued writing and photography as two distinct, parallel interests. It took me some time to realise that the themes and ideas I was pursuing were the same whatever the medium, and I think that realisation gave me the impetus to start to combine these media into pieces of creative work. I felt that it was possible for me to say more by combining the two media, allowing me to draw on inspirations from the world of literature as well as photography.
In a way, everything I do starts as a walk. I derive my inspiration from the local landscape, I take my photographs there, and words will often form in my head while I am walking. But I also read voraciously; my work is informed by myths, by stories, by abstract ideas. I feel strongly that artists bring all of the influences and experiences of their life to the production of work; our work is the sum of all that we are and have lived through. For this reason, I resist the label of being a ‘landscape photographer’, because I believe that the stories I tell are partly about the land, and partly about the people who interact with it.
My work is also haunted by the spectre of climate change. I find it difficult to say anything original about the plight in which we find ourselves, and so these themes are there in my work but not explicit, like a ghost at a feast.
Can you say something about the circumstances and context in which you make your artwork? To what degree is your practice integrated with the other aspects of your life?
I currently have a paid job which is nothing to do with my creative work, and thus my work feels a bit like my ‘second career’; one which is subordinate to the process of earning money. However, this creative work does feel to be an expression of my ‘true’ life — the one I live for three days of the week — and is in my mind very connected with feelings of place and home. I produce my work from home, I develop my photographs here, and I feel that the landscape around me is both the subject and the inspiration for what I do. In that respect, my work is an extension of a personal philosophy or way of living; one which favours the handmade, the haptic, the creative; and one which is rooted in landscape, the natural world and the place of humans within them.
How would you describe the relationship between your work and the larger culture in which you live?
I often feel that my work is a form of gentle resistance to the culture in which I live. I describe myself, on my social media, as ‘an analogue device in a digital world’; I feel increasingly estranged from the values and attitudes of a western twenty-first century capitalist culture. I am, however, fascinated by the idea of culture in relation to the landscapes and places I photograph. I find myself drawn to artefacts and objects in the landscape — stone walls, gateposts, ruined cottages — which are relics of a different era. I am interested in how people lived when they were much more closely immersed in the land, and the borders between our cultural life and the natural world were more porous. At one level, this seems almost nostalgic (a word which, by the way, means ‘a yearning for home’, so perhaps I am truly a nostalgist), but I would also like to believe that an exploration of how we once lived might inform how we could live.
Returning to the theme of climate change, increasingly I feel that a momentous act of resistance will be required to break down the edifice of capital and the environmental destruction which is currently the zeitgeist of the western world. I feel at times to be part of a counter-cultural movement; one which is nebulous, ill-defined and fragmented, but will nonetheless become increasingly important as we develop new ways of living with the changing world.
How do you feel about putting your artwork out into the world and it being seen by others? Do the responses of audiences to your work matter to you?
I suspect that, if I could not identify an audience for my work, I would feel far less motivated to produce it. I feel compelled to ‘speak’, through my words and images, with an urgency that I did not feel when younger. However, the process of producing work and putting it out in the world is daunting for me — like many artists, I think I experience a kind of ‘imposter syndrome’ that must be overcome each and every time I produce something. This also means that I am unduly concerned about whether my work is liked or not; I’d like to be more confident about it, but I guess that’s something with which I will continue to grapple.
Whereabouts in the world are you? Or if applicable, where has your work taken you? In what ways does geographical location affect or inflect your practice?
I live in an area of west Cumbria which is largely rural and, compared to much of England, relatively ‘wild’ (it’s not wild, of course, but feels less developed than many places). I have lived here for much of my adult life, and feel very embedded in this place, more so than other parts of the country. I love this landscape, and feel that I have developed the vocabulary to ‘read’ the landscape in terms of understanding its features, its plants and animals, its moods and weathers. At one level, my work is a love letter to this specific landscape; I rarely take photographs more than a walk or a bike ride away from my home. At another level, however, the places I photograph are not recognisable; they are fragments of landscape which represent a kind of imagined anyplace, in which I can tell stories of human interactions. Through these images, I am pursuing universal themes of our relationship with land, the connections we may have or may have lost, the ways in which the land is an extension of our human lives.
How would you describe the relationship of your practice to money and commerce and exchange? Do you sell your work? Have you received funding for your work? Does the issue of commerce affect the nature of the work itself?
I am fortunate in that I do not rely on the production and sale of my creative work for my primary income. I therefore feel unfettered, in some way, to produce work I want to produce at a scale and pace which suits me.
I do sell my zines, ensuring that I can comfortably cover the costs, but the income from them is less important to me than the desire to see them out in the world, and through this to engage in interactions and conversations with other artist-photographers.
On a related note, what are your thoughts and/or feelings about the commercial and institutional ‘art world’? To what extent are you involved with it, or would you like to be?
I think that the ‘art world’ is multi-faceted; it is a network of many layers with which we choose to interact or not. When we buy a handmade bowl from a potter, or a novel from the bookshop, or a hand-designed fabric, we are engaging with one dimension of the ‘art world’. For millennia, society has produced people who live by the production of creative product; bards, musicians, potters, wood turners. I feel honoured to interact with people of talent in my local area who are continuing this tradition, and it is this small-scale, local version of the art world of which I feel a part.
The institutional and commercial aspects of that can seem to work against the production of authentic work, of course, but I would not want to criticise a designer for wanting their work to be sold to a wider audience, or a novelist for securing a deal with a major publisher. What should be expected, of course, is a fair return for the creative person whose work is being commercialised; sadly that is not always the case.
Interestingly, the opportunities for creatives to directly access their audience (by social media, through platforms such as Etsy or their own websites, and so on) are greater than they have ever been. There is a kind of democratisation of artistic output taking place which is heartening and speaks to a flourishing of the creative arts in the face of contradictory commercial pressures.
Finally, is there anything else that you would like to say, or like to be asked, about your practice or about anything else?
I would like to acknowledge the importance of community in the development of any artistic practice. I have benefitted enormously from the friendship, good humour and feedback of a loose network of photographers, writers and artists, mostly through social media, and most of whom I have never actually met. Whatever the failings of the digital age, and social media in particular, it does enable the development of like-minded communities not constrained by geography.
These networks of like-minded people (a friend of mine refers to them as ‘like-hearted’) are our lifeline when the world beyond seems unfathomable. They are a lifebelt in a roaring sea.
Links:
Website: www.printedland.weebly.com
Bluesky account: @printedland.bsky.social
