Ann Hamilton · ciliary

Wall-mounted lithograph and fabric assemblage with bamboo and wood support
Edition of 19 unique works (colors vary)
Published by Gemini G.E.L.
Approximately 60 x 60 x 8 inches

Published by long-time collaborator Gemini G.E.L., the ciliary edition included 19 unique, wall mounted works with varying colors and slightly different dimensions.

Ann Hamilton · ciliary

"My first hand is a sewing hand. A line of thread drawn up and down through cloth influences how I think about the confluence and rhythms of space and time. The recent edition of ciliary, along with carriage and follow, began with the extension of a single line. Drawn, sewn or written, a line contains all the attention present in its moment of making, the rhythms of breath and body, the weather of hesitations and the stutter of the hand orbiting in the body’s immediate periphery.  Folded, cut or accreted, the line’s incessant horizontality returns to itself and takes a circular form.  It is simple work; it requires the body to be slow.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay CIRCLES begins:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.  We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

For me, the circle of the hand making is the first eye. It is the empty center in the tower, the clearing in the forest, where with the fundaments of cloth and paper and line we weave and re-weave unending relations."


Photo credit: Jenny Fine