Ann Hamilton: Habitus

Patricia C. Phillips

Softcover | 23.01 x 2.24 x 31.75 cm | 192 pp

Prestel | 2017 | 9783791357096

"Held by cloth's hand, we are swaddled at birth, covered in sleep, and wound in death," muses artist Ann Hamilton. Rather than documenting the experience of Habitus - her enormous immersive 2016-17 installation in Philadelphia, this book is as much a part of the project as its three-dimensional counterparts. 

Lush photography, archival imagery, and lucid prose come together to help readers understand Hamilton's ideas about the fabric of and in our lives. Like a thread through cloth, these individual images and words weave together strands of history, technology, poetry, and motion into one extraordinary and compelling experience.

Ann Hamilton (b.1956) is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric centre of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.