Pati Hill

Pati Hill
Slave Days,
1975
black and white offset publication (60 pages)
ed. Kornblee
nn/nn

In 1975, Hill published the book Slave Days with financial support from the poet James Merrill. The book is comprised of 29 poemsthematizing the partly fictionalized everyday lives of housewives, which were then juxtaposed with 31 xerographs. Slave Days was Hill’s firstwork to combine her xerographs with her own texts, which also described the production site of the works with a sinister humor. In onepoem she notes that “Heaven’s door is open to us like a big vacuum cleaner,” thus resignedly outlining the limits of her own spaces ofagency. Here, Hill doesn’t use the xerographs as material for a collage or the starting point for further production, but rather presents themalongside her texts as independent works. She thus had a sense of production and reception being equally important parts of her practice.Even though she mostly worked outside of an institutional context and exhibited irregularly, she also wrote about the process of publishing:“I have always thought publishing should be like taking your clothes to the laundromat.”