Ann Hamilton is an artist who has created a wide range of works, including objects, photographs, videos, and performances, but who is best-known for her room-sized installations. She was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956; she lives in Columbus, Ohio. After studying textile design in college, she studied sculpture at art school. Regarding her education, she has observed: "The link most people miss is from the textile work. It was a simple step from covering the body and seeing clothing as a skin that surrounds one to looking at architecture in that way. But it was still a huge shift in scale and thinking." Indeed, many of her works, ranging from the dense and prickly toothpick suit she wore in a 1984 performance, to the layers of algae that covered the walls of capacity of absorption (1988), to the candle soot that licked the walls of accountings (1992), can be read as second skins that make that which was hidden all the more present through the screen of evocative markings.
Hamilton's installations are often large in scale. They typically consist of arrangements of massive amounts of everyday materials, such as coins, flowers, and sheets of white paper. Some include films, video, and sound. Others feature live animals or an actual person, including the artist herself, engaging in a repetitive task. For example, in one work, a person sat in a landscape of horse hair using a heated stylus to methodically singe lines of text from a book. In another work, the artist herself sat motionless at a table piled with men's starched shirts. These evocative works activate the visitor's senses—hearing, smell, and touch, as well as sight—as sources of knowledge about themselves and their environment.
In her book Ann Hamilton (New York: Abrams, 2002), the art historian Joan Simon has offered an especially eloquent description of Hamilton's installations:
Ann Hamilton makes unfamiliar rooms, unfamiliar scenes, in familiar places. They are perceptual situations as much as spatial and temporal interventions, a kind of art-making that in general may be described as a way of working and a resulting work that intersects the real and the invented, that emphasizes the process and duration of its making as well as the finite amount of time it is shown to the public in material form, and that locates meaning in the interrelationships of adjacent parts as well as the contexts in which the individual components were found or made. The overall work . . . is thus imbued with the social and historical conditions of its siting as well as the particulars of its making and architectural housing.
Finally, Hamilton has described her working process as a conversation. She begins with a particular site. Her physical and emotional responses to the site often trigger a flow of images, impressions, and ideas that she develops into physical form. Crucial to this process are her discussions with the local community and her research of its social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. The artist's collaboration with the curator, the technical crew, the local community, and others develops into an intensive dialogue from which the work gradually emerges.