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Lucy Hill: desireline


22 October 2026 — 17 January 2027

Lucy Hill:
desireline

The Arts House Trust Graduate Exhibition Scholarship 2026

Opening Celebration: Thursday 22 October • 5:30 - 7:30PM

Lucy Hill employs clay and wool in desireline to explore the layered histories embedded within the whenua and architecture of the Pah Homestead. Clay references the surrounding land and its pre-colonial histories, while wool reflects on livestock’s role in reshaping the landscape and the colonial impulse to impose order upon both society and nature. Through subtle interventions integrated into the Homestead’s evolving architectural features, Hill invites visitors to engage in a slow, attentive encounter with often overlooked details. Activated through walking, the work fosters relationships between visitor, building, and whenua, revealing the enduring traces of history held within these interconnected spaces.

Lucy Hill, desirelines, 2025 (still). Image courtesy of the artist.

desireline explores the relationships and tensions between land and human, considering the ways each informs the other. Walking becomes a tool for observation and a means of forming connections between human and nonhuman bodies. A desire line is an unplanned path formed through the repeated movement of humans or animals across land. Once a trace becomes visible, other bodies follow what already exists. Continued use erodes remaining groundcover, compacts the soil, and makes the path increasingly difficult to grow over. The more a desire line is used, the more visible it becomes. Without continual use, however, it begins to disappear.

Lucy Hill’s video footage adopts a unique perspective, framing the landscape through the movement of her legs as she follows a chosen path. These are paths formed by humans, animals, and machines, and shaped by the environments through which they move. Movement becomes a form of replication: bodies following existing traces, repeating and reinforcing what has already been made.

Lucy Hill uses clay and wool to mould forms around and within the homestead stairwell, highlighting the interventions made upon the land. She considers how trees were felled to make way for colonial pastures; how timber was transformed into architectural structures, and how the landscape was reshaped through processes of removal, replacement, and construction. Clay becomes a material of memory and history, holding the possibility of form and reformation. Malleable and continually changing, it evokes the earth as a body that holds what exists and grows above it.

In desireline, small interventions throughout the Pah Homestead reference and utilise the building's unique architectural details, responding to the ways its spaces have changed over time. These gestures invite a slow contemplation of the details held within both the building and surrounding grounds, drawing attention to overlooked spaces and traces of use. Across the exhibition, land is not treated as passive ground, but as something continually shaped through movement, occupation, memory, and time. Paths emerge, disappear, and emerge again. Bodies leave traces; traces guide bodies. What remains is never entirely fixed.

About the artist

Lucy Hill studied at Dunedin School of Art/Otago Polytechnic, graduating in 2024 with BVA Honours. Hill’s work explores the day-to-day environments around her home in Ōtepoti through sculpture, clay, walking, and site-specific interventions. She contemplates human control and the rebuilding of relationships between human and nonhuman worlds, while working with materials that can break down over time. Recent exhibitions include foot/path Greenroom, Ōtautahi, 2025, Botanising the Asphalt, Site, Ōtepoti, 2024 and Pieces, Spaces, Species at Blue Oyster with Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye and Taarn Scott, Curated by Simon Palenski, 2023.

This exhibition is supported by The Arts House Trust and the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Te Kura Matatini ki Otago. Lucy Hill is the 2026 recipient of The Arts House Trust & Dunedin School of Art Graduate Exhibition Scholarship.

One of the most exciting opportunities for fine arts graduates from the Dunedin School of Art, is the chance to exhibit their work in Auckland. This Scholarship offers selected graduating students the opportunity to showcase their work at the Pah Homestead, providing valuable exposure and experience within a professional exhibition setting.

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