Contact: rowlandhillart (at) gmail (dot) com
Instagram: @row.land.hill
View CV

I am an artist based in Manchester. My practice incorporates live performance, installation, film and video, sound, collage, experimental events and curating. I am interested in creating site-specific experiences that play with the artifice and heightened emotional states associated with live performance and its stagecraft. Much of my work deals with ideas of absence and presence, and explores the forms and limits of language borrowed from theatre, cinema, dance music, music videos and various other kinds of popular entertainment. 

My debut institutional solo show Logical Song (4 Feb - 3 March 2024) at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester explored the aesthetics of 1990s Eurodance music, club culture and local fairgrounds, transforming the gallery into an ambiguous attraction.

Other recent work includes Fluchtpunkt, a light and sound installation commissioned by artist Mark Leckey and the Turner Contemporary for a variety show at Dreamland in Margate; my ongoing event 100 Videos with artist Darren Nixon which presents 100 videos on 100 screens for 100 minutes; and the four-hour performance-installation Opera made with composer Jack Sheen. I am one half of artist duo Rowland’s Leaving with Darren Nixon.

I am currently the recipient of a Manchester Open Award, selected from over 470 artists whose work was exhibited at Manchester Open 2024. In 2018 I received the Clare Winsten Memorial Award from the Slade School of Art in London where I completed my MA in Fine Art. In recent years I have been awarded a Jerwood Bursary and shortlisted for the prestigious Jerwood & MAYK grant for artists working in radical live performance. In 2018, the event series I co-directed from 2012-2022, Video Jam, won the People’s Choice Award at the inaugural Manchester Culture Awards. 

I have also performed and interpreted the work of others artists, which have including UK premieres of work by Yvonne Rainer and Vito Acconci, at venues such as Tate Britain, London Contemporary Music Festival, Five Years Gallery (London) and the Lowry (Salford). Documentation of this work and more is at my performance archive.