Susan Hiller

The "Midnight" Self Portraits 1980 - 89

Midnight Waterloo 1987
Midnight Euston 1983

"...In the early work-- the presentation of automatic scripts such as Sisters of Menon and Get William-- direct evidence is set out in the form of the original hand-written scripts with simple type-written transcriptions arranged in such a way as to suggest the non-linear, a- logical nature of the messages, securing attention to the messages the works exist to mediate and eliminating the subjective presence, the personality, of the artist. Significantly, the Photomat Self-portraits disguise and deface her appearance, disclose only fragments of her face and body, and begin, in any case, with the 'work' of an automatic machine incapable of interpretation.... Her project is to establish the multiplicity of our identity, to secure the knowledge that the individual self is a dynamic outcome of a process of representations, the meanings of which may in many cases be hidden from us...Art, like dreams, is a means of access to the largely unmapped space where the suppressed, the forgotten and the unknown are to be discovered in order that they may be brought into and transform our waking discourse with reality...

Mel Gooding, Art Monthly, 1985