A chance encounter with the work of Rembrandt van Rijn while homeless was the moment Hill decided he would become a painter. Drawing from his own experiences of chronic illness, trauma, and homelessness, Hill situates his practice at the intersection of personal history, social critique, and historical dialogue.
Through Ordinary, Hill creates portrait paintings that reclaim the stories of people often reduced to diagnoses or social marginalisation. Travelling across the UK, he spends weeks with each subject, embedding himself in their communities. The work depicts quiet moments of everyday life. Hill describes the project as an argument against the categories through which people are usually seen: diagnosis, circumstance, crisis, recovery.
Hill's process is both rigorous and ethically engaged: subjects are co-authors of their representation, with agency embedded in the creation and reception of each portrait. In doing so, Hill exposes the power dynamics historically encoded in portraiture while creating a space where dignity is a default, not a reward.
Ordinary
"I go from town to town. I sit with people for hours, days, sometimes weeks. I drink their coffee. I hear their stories. I feel the weight of their days settle into my own skin. If I'm doing it right, I disappear into it entirely. By the time I leave, I don't know who's being painted. Them, or me. I tell the world my work is about mental health and the marginalised, and then I show them people. The unrecorded moments outside of crisis and recovery. No labels. No categories. Just people, moving through life together.
Human. Beautiful. Ordinary."
— Siris Hill