Ann Hamilton is addicted to large spaces, which she fills with a variety of media to create colourful and playful installations that confuse the senses. Aidan Dunne visits a retrospective of her work at IMMA
Since the early 1980s, the US artist Ann Hamilton has been making ambitious, sensually dense, even luscious installations that conflate the intimate and the epic. They frequently feature what she terms the "amplification" of a small bodily gesture or activity, like sewing or reading, to fill symbolically a huge architectural space.
Often vast quantities of some emblematic objects or materials are involved, such as horsehair, flowers, denim work clothes, powdered pigment, books, coinage, paper and, especially, fabric. Live birds have been included more than once. "When you get addicted to large spaces," she notes wryly, "it can become expensive."
Because these installations, more than 60 of them so far, are usually site specific and ephemeral, and depend significantly on an audience's direct physical experience of them, they are difficult to describe or paraphrase. Yet at hand, the exhibition of her work that has just opened at IMMA, has a retrospective dimension to it, featuring photographic, video and sculptural elements drawn from every stage of her output to date, as well as a substantial kinetic installation.
The show also coincides with the first comprehensive book on her work to date. That book, by Joan Simon, includes a beautifully illustrated, meticulously documented record of all of Hamilton's major projects. It was, she observes "seven years in the making," and it looks like a labour of love, evidencing exceptional attention to detail.
Hamilton grew up in Columbus, Ohio and, having lived in New York, California and Canada, she moved back there about 10 years ago. Her background is, she says, in textiles. That is, she took a degree in textile design in 1979, having studied liberal arts, ceramics, design and weaving. A scholarship to the Banf Centre for the Arts in Canada led her to an environment in which interdisciplinary dialogue was actively encouraged. There she made her first installation, a kind of re-enactment of weaving on a room-sized scale. She also became interested in photography.
Her early photographs make up a primer of ideas she has since explored on a larger scale. In these small prints, soberly attired with her trademark close-cropped hair and even demeanour, she is pictured in a number of staged poses with various props. Senses, body parts and domestic objects are oddly scrambled and intermingled. In one image, sound from a megaphone is visualised as wads of cloth engulfing her: you could say that the cloth is "amplified" in the same way that materials are amplified in her subsequent installations. In other images, an arm becomes a leg, or a hat becomes a basin.
They are based, she says, on "displacements of things that function in relation to the body". In a way, as Simon writes, Hamilton is a storyteller, but her stories evidence a distrust of language in favour of other ways of telling and knowing. In conversation, she refers several times to the concept of immersion. She seems to love the idea of being plunged into an enveloping, unmediated context, one you must come to terms with without the handle of language, one you cannot readily articulate. Perhaps that is why the performance aspects of her installations often feature the erasure of the printed word, or its reprocessing into a form that is not easily assimilable.
Books with obscured, erased or carefully burnt text survive after the event as sculptural objects. When she uses the voice in installations, it is, as Simon describes it, "muffled, stuttering, or speaking in whispers or in code". The video pieces in at hand include the Beckettian image of the artist's mouth filled with marbles, which she rolls around in what could be taken as a parody, or cancelling of speech.
In a similar vein, during one installation she systematically sanded the silvering from the central area of a stack of mirrors, symbolically erasing the reflected image of self. The same desire, to thwart or recast the conventional modes of communication and comprehension, is evident in a long-term photographic project, which involves using her mouth as an eye. By putting a pinhole camera in her mouth, she has made on-going series of portraits that, fortuitously, are lens-shaped because, she explains, that happened to be the shape made by her lips. The confusion of functions - mouth sees, eye speaks - are characteristic.
She has referred to architectural space as being like a skin that you inhabit, and her work could be seen as a way of re-experiencing a space in just that way. Unusually, "I don't really have a studio practice", as she puts it. Her studio in Ohio is more an office. The pieces are usually generated in situ. This not only involves an intuitive response to the feeling of a place, but also the selective acknowledgement of its context in physical, cultural and historical terms.
The main component of her installation indigo blue in Charleston in 1991, for example, used 14,000 lbs of used blue work clothes, carefully folded and stacked. The effect was to evoke what she described as "the lost history" of the vast, anonymous army of plantation workers producing indigo and cotton. A veritable mountain of clothing was sited in an industrial building in Pinckney Street, named after Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who ran a plantation for her father and, in 1744, introduced indigo to the American colonies.
If blue is Hamilton's trademark external colour, red is used recurrently in a way that might imply the interior of the body. At the 1999 Venice Biennale, where she represented the US, her striking installation used enormous quantities of bright, pinkish red powdered pigment. Sifting gently down the walls, the pigment highlighted embossed braille patterns and accumulated in heaps on the floor. In a sense, she transformed the pavilion into the interior of a mouth, framing the texts inscribed in braille and "speaking" them as they became visible - another typical mix-up of faculties. True to her instinct, however, she did not make it easy for us to "hear" what this mouth was saying. This is just an outline description of a complex and rewarding work that was layered with subtle implications.
Although she is probably best known for these and other installations that utilise enormous quantities of various materials, the trend in her work is definitely towards using less physical material without any diminution of physical or, for that matter, temporal scale. "I think the emphasis has shifted to the question of how to frame the work in terms of its content rather than in terms of the material."
But this still has to do with "the application of a mechanical vocabulary." Although she is one of the best known installation artists in the world, she is wary of the label installation artist. "Maybe it's not a useful term. It implies something that I suppose I don't do. I don't go into a space and make another world. I ask myself how I can animate the space that is there, how can I make it more present in response to what is there."
From the beginning she has been open to working collaboratively, and that aspect of her activity has grown, involving poets, including Susan Stewart, and dancers. She is working with Meredith Monk (some of whose video work can be seen at EV+A in Limerick). One of the projects that excites her most at the moment is distinctly architectural, involving the design and construction of a tower, in the double-helix form of a strand of DNA, in northern California. While she is extremely busy, with many projects on the go at once, "somehow," she says, "they're all one project".
• at hand is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until July 14th
• Ann Hamilton by Joan Simon is published by Harry N. Abrams at €75