Pati Hill, an acclaimed author of fiction in the 1950s and ’60s who later turned to visual art, distinguishing herself with images made from a relatively new artistic tool — an IBM photocopier — died on Friday at her home in Sens, France. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by Arthur Lubow, a journalist who interviewed Ms. Hill many times while researching a biography about one of her close friends, the photographer Diane Arbus.
Ms. Hill, a native of Kentucky, spent several years in France beginning in the 1940s working as a model. Weary of that work, she retreated to a cabin, cut her hair and began to write.
Her first book, “The Pit and the Century Plant” (1955), was a colorful account of life in her corner of the French countryside. Her second, published in 1957, was a novel rooted in her youth, “The Nine-Mile Circle.”
Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Charles Poore wrote that her evocation of the complicated events and eccentric characters in a small Southern town resembled the approach of William Faulkner, but that it stood on its own.
“We have heard this all before, all before,” Mr. Poore wrote. “But we have seldom heard these stories told again as Miss Hill tells them in a flowing stream of narrative that is a skillful blend of conscious and subconscious impressions. Without benefit of quotation marks she makes dialogue a part of exposition, and exposition an extension of dialogue.” He called the novel “one of the most unusual and enjoyable books of the year.”
“Prosper,” a 1960 novel set in a French village, and “One Thing I Know,” a 1962 novella about the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in Washington, were both praised for their unusual approaches and nuanced characters. Ms. Hill also published a book of poems in 1962, “The Snow Rabbit.” But then, as she did with her modeling career, she changed direction.
By the early 1960s she had moved back to the United States and was living in Stonington, Conn., where she gave birth, in 1962, to a daughter, Paola. At the time, her husband, Paul Bianchini, a French-born gallery owner, was becoming well known for bringing attention to postwar painters including Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Although Ms. Hill was untrained as a visual artist, by the mid-70s she had begun making art herself, including needlework that played with traditional artistic images.
Then she discovered the IBM copier and, with the help of the designer Charles Eames, whom she had befriended, she eventually persuaded IBM to lend her one for an extended period.
She was far from the first person to play with the possibilities presented by photocopiers, but she was among the medium’s most enduring and articulate advocates. She found particular satisfaction in what she said were the bolder contrasts and tones of IBM copiers (as opposed to the more common Xerox machines), and her work was exhibited many times in New York, in France and elsewhere. She also published several books that combined her stories and poems with photocopied images.
Among her best-known artworks was a series of images of a dead swan she had found and flopped onto the glass top of a copier. Called “A Swan: An Opera in Nine Chapters,” the series was included in an exhibition called “Electroworks,” which began at the George Eastman House in Rochester in 1979 and was later at the Cooper Hewitt museum in Manhattan.
Ms. Hill put all sorts of things on copiers and, when they did not fit or could not be moved, she moved the copier. In the early ’80s, she set out to photocopy the palace at Versailles, or as much of it as she could: sculptures, draperies, bedspreads.
“I wanted to see what the copier, a modern device, would make of something old,” she told The New Yorker in 1980.
Patricia Louise Guion Hill was born on April 3, 1921, in Rugby, Ky., and grew up in Virginia. She attended George Washington University before moving to New York and finding work as a model.
She is survived by her daughter. Mr. Bianchini died in 2000. Her two previous marriages ended in divorce.
In 2016, Arcadia University Art Gallery in Pennsylvania will present a retrospective of Ms. Hill’s early photocopier work. The exhibition will draw connections between her work and the way images are now shared on the Internet.
“Copiers bring artists and writers together,” Ms. Hill told The New Yorker. “Copies are an international visual language, which talks to people in Los Angeles and people in Prague the same way. Making copies is very near to speaking.”
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