Roxanne L. P. Hjorth
Roxanne L. P. Hjorth is a self-taught abstract watercolor artist based in Switzerland. Hjorth has maintained her artist practice alongside a decade-long career in the tech industry, both in Silicon Valley and in Zürich, Switzerland, as a designer, researcher, and strategist specializing in sociotechnical interaction and human centered design.
“Roxanne Louise Pinto Hjorth's watercolor work explores a delicate space between landscape abstraction and the imaginary cartography of terrain. Through washes, gradations, and transparencies, she composes floating territories where forms suggest mountains, valleys, or bodies of water without ever freezing them in place. Her subtle layers overlap like geological strata, creating a silent depth that evokes both the memory of a place and its possible invention. This tension between poetic observation and mental construction lends her works a meditative dimension, where the gaze wanders freely, guided by the rhythms of color and the breath of the paper.” – François Lavaud, Gallery manager at Marivaud Studio
"Roxanne is an accomplished leader and experienced design strategist operating in the technology industry, bringing a deep interest in the interplay between AI and society. She has spent her career researching the capabilities of new technologies and creating impactful products and experiences. Roxanne offers a rare blend of expertise in content strategy, UX design, research and experiment design. She is passionate about shaping how technologies are used and firmly believes that technology should fit into people’s lives in ways that are comfortable, safe and useful. To this end, Roxanne is a founding contributor to Google’s ‘The People + AI Guidebook’ (PAIR), a practical guide for designing human-centred AI products, which has been used globally both inside and outside of Google.” — The MCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University
Interests
My painting practice embodies my philosophy of crossing boundaries. Blending the structure and focus of Sumi-e with the expressiveness and innovation of western watercolour helps me practice seeing the creation of the work as part of the work. Since residing in Switzerland, western watercolor techniques and methods have led to my color-rich, highly-technical practice of today.
My paintings address themes of exploration, mapping, navigation of internal worlds. I aim to create visual interfaces that situate the viewer in alternate dimensions for better understanding of the here and now, and the systems that move us through time. The latest instantiation of my painting practice stems from contemplating the unconscious. I have been inspired by the spontaneous spiritual paintings of Hilma Af Klimt, Georgia O’Keefe, and Mark Adams.
