Katja Hock
In this new photographic work Katja Hock documents the institutional space of the hospital as a means to explore the relationship between these spaces and the people that use them.
These normally busy environments are depicted devoid of visible human presence, leaving just the memory of activity.
This emptiness prompts the viewer to reflect on their own transient occupation of such spaces, and to explore the temporary nature of these relationships.
In one sequence of images Hock places the viewer within the framework of a hospital. The photographs showing objects such as the pillows and sheets, seats in a waiting room, and finally the operating table.
Other images are less descriptive and locational, yet metonymic, these show, for example, the inside of a bath, the pattern formed through condensation, allowing a space for the viewer’s imagination to enter the photographic field and what lies beyond.
Through her photographs Hock shows the ways in which the patient’s presence appears as marks and traces literally upon the fabric of the hospital architecture and in the belief that these marks and traces can represent aspects of subjective human experience within a site which is dominated by its needs for standardisation and efficiency.
With photographs devoid of literal human presence, taken and presented in this specific way Hock creates an entry point for the viewer to make-up the image through his/her own imagination, a possibility for the interval between perception and recollection to be informed by the viewer’s unconscious.
About the Artist
Born 1971 in Nettetal, Germany, Katja, studied photography at Fachhochule Bielefeld and subsequently completed an MA at the University of Derby.
She is currently finishing her PhD at Central Saint Martins. Katja has had many exhibitions both in Germany, the UK, Greece and Holland.
Email: katjakhock@waitrose.com
Exhibition homepage: http://www.focalpoint.org.uk
