Art Star: ANN HAMILTON

ANN HAMILTON

b. Lima, Ohio, in 1956

Lives and works in Ohio

EDUCATION

BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979

MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985

From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.

Anne Hamilton's website

Matterings

LEW Wood Floor

At the Central Library, you don’t even need to open a book to find all sorts of written text.  Ann Hamilton’s LEW Wood Floor (2004) is composed of sentences in 11 different languages, welcoming all visitors to the library. As a continuous tactile field, the wood floor consists of 556 lines of maple floorboard routed to make a walkable surface of relief letter forms. It  covers 7,200 square feet in the Evelyn W Foster Learning Center, at the 4^th Avenue entrance, which is home to the Literacy/ESL/World Languages (LEW) Collection, from which the project derives its name. The artist chose languages that represent the largest and most frequently used areas of the LEW Collection: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese.

If you look closely, you will see that the letters are backwards . . . a reference to traditional typesetting technique in the days before digital printing. In addition, the task of reading the floorboards backwards “demonstrates the experience of learning to read as a process wherein abstract symbols become, in time, transparent and meaningful words and sentences.” The artist collected “1,543 first sentences gathered by patrons and librarians from books in The Seattle Public Library Fiction and LEW collection. Fiction and non-fiction, poetry and musical lyrics are the dominant textual sources. First lines may not be the most notable line of a book, but after the cover they are a universal portal to an immersion in a book’s interior world. The project seeks to evoke a tactile experience of book production and reading in this digital age.”

tropos

The installation tropos, like all of Ann Hamilton’s works, is a sensory experience. Created as a site-specific installation for Dia Center for the Arts in New York City, tropos refers to the idea of tropism, meaning a natural tendency, or a living being’s proclivity to respond to stimuli in a specific way, such as a plant that grows towards light.

The installation is made primarily from horse hair—a vast landscape of varying shades of hair from the tails of horses covers the entire floor of the 5,000-square foot space. Hamilton altered the floor beneath the hair with poured concrete, the effects of which are subtle shifts in the floor’s topography beneath the hair, which becomes clear only when a visitor walks across the room. Further on into the interior of the space, Hamilton has placed a small metal table, at which a seated attendant works diligently to burn the printed words from a book as smoke rises from the seared text. Muted, but audible, is a distant voice struggling to articulate words, which remain unintelligible for the most part. A final, subtle aspect of tropos is the sealed unity of the room, an effect created by Hamilton’s use of translucent glass in the windows; light beams in, yet sight to the outside is precluded. Like many of Hamilton’s large-scale works, tropos was created by hand through the collaborative efforts of many individuals, both at the FW+M and Dia Center for the Arts. The community that evolves from labor-intensive production is an important component of Hamilton’s methodology and artistic practice.

In 1994, after the completion of tropos, Hamilton created a second project with the FWM. A limited edition multiple encased in a glass and wood vitrine, her Untitled project is a collar fabricated from linen and horse hair. Strands of horse hair were used to embroider a 16th century-style alphabet on the inside of the collar. The unfinished ends of the embroidered hair pass through to the exterior of the collar, forming a swirling, circular mass of hair. The object recalls historic relics—an Elizabethan ruff, for example—yet remains connected to sensory experience through its assumed placement around a person’s throat with the letters of the alphabet resting near the voice box. Untitled references a relationship between the rapid growth of literacy and a gradual devaluation of non-verbal knowledge, such as that learned and experienced in the body.