Since she first came to wide public attention in the mid-1980s, Ann Hamilton has focused almost exclusively on large-scale installations that combine architectural, sculptural, audio, video, mechanical and often live elements.

She also has developed a personal vocabulary, emerging out of her fascinations with written and spoken language, with labor and buildings, and with the more beguiling aspects of natural and human phenomena—all of which have been explored in more than 60 installations around the world. In 1999, she represented the United States at the Sao Paolo Bienal, and in 1999, she appeared at the Venice Biennale. Later this spring, her first building project, entitled Tower, will be unveiled at Oliver Ranch in Northern California.

Gregory R. Miller & Co.’s recently published Ann Hamilton: an inventory of objects provides further enlightenment on her oeuvre, with an essay by Joan Simon and a catalog of the various objects that have been part of Hamilton’s installations since 1984. It is a fascinating volume, and it provided the focus for our conversation with Hamilton about the broader themes in her career and the many questions that inspire her latest works.

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Ann, this book is rather like a retrospective on paper. What did it teach you about the development of your own work?

It’s interesting. The process of pulling the book together was a way to examine the material vocabulary that had come out of my installation work, or that had been part of developing it. So much of my work has been about matching the scale of architecture, but I’ve always done that through the accumulation of human-scale gestures in one form or another: like the extension of the hand, and how the hand reaches for material. This book was a way to focus on that human scale in my work.

You’ve never been regarded primarily as an object-maker. Was it strange that the book focused so much on objects?

I’ve always been a little bit insecure about this part of my work (maybe “insecure” isn’t quite the right word) but I’ve always wondered what the objects are: What are these things? How do I name them to myself? What’s my relationship to them?

I think that you always have these simultaneous and opposite longings in what you’re making. On the one hand, there’s the longing to disappear into time and space and light and the attention of the moment—things that are disembodied—and then, on the other hand, you want to touch, to hold onto, to understand things. They are equal and opposite longings for me. So, because I primarily worked on this architectural scale, I’ve always had questions about what these things are. Sean Kelly [Hamilton’s New York gallerist] has been really supportive and encouraging, saying that this aspect of the work has its own veracity, and that it’s something you can see and understand.

Was preparing this book like the process of making an installation?

It was very similar; it was really extraordinary. Every process is a whole world. I always think that when I make an installation. There are all these relationships that form very powerfully in the time that you’re doing something.

In the book, I was struck by how powerfully the objects used by people in the original installations continue to suggest their presence. I’m thinking specifically of the hat filled with honey, from privation and excesses (1989), that originally sat in the performer's lap while she wrung her hands in the honey.

I’ve tried to be very careful about distinguishing between something that comes from an installation that might distill some of the core relationships that were part of the work, and the things that are more like souvenirs that don’t really contain the relationships. I think you’re right, that one distills the relationships from the hat to the chair to the cloth in the presence of the body. It also made me think about the way that the image of the body has not figured in my work—it’s just the presence. I think that’s true in the installation works and I think that it’s true in the objects.

Something else I realized is how often you’ve used repetition in your installations. There’s not just one glass with a water vortex in the capacity of absorption, there’s 100 of them.

Yes. It helped me to understand that the work has been built out of the relationship of single objects, gestures, or materials to a larger “field”—that’s the word I’ve been using.

By “field,” do you mean the context that is the larger work?

I mean context, but I also mean literally the field that it makes when it’s multiplied. When the single blade of grass becomes the lawn. The single thing can exist in one form or structure, but in my thinking there is always the possibility of the field and discovering what happens when you make the whole field.

Why did you decide to publish the book as an inventory?

The crass part of it is the simple inventory of objects: here’s this stuff that I have! But the whole process is also taking stock of where you’ve been, as a way of going toward what you don’t know. Because objects haven’t been at the center of my practice, going back and tracing through the lineage of these things was also a way of tracing through the way my work has shifted conceptually.

I enjoyed how the book documents how many of your earlier concerns are still relevant today.

In a way when you go through a process like this you’re giving yourself a vocabulary back, or a different way of naming the things that you’ve done. It opens it back up. The thing that was really exciting about making the book was that all along the way I was returning to ideas that are still alive for me. There are things that—if I have time—I want to return to, and draw forward now. I went through the book and I made all these notes: “You’re not done with collars,” and “You really need to return to this,” and “Oh, I wanted to make that!” So the act of inventorying is going back to go forward.

So what projects are you working on now?

I’m in the middle of the trying to make a chorus of speakers. I don’t know exactly where it’s going. There are questions about speaking in unison, and collective speaking, and speaking in public spaces, and where do you speak, and what do you say, and what do we need to hear, and how does it need to be said—all of those kinds of questions.

But isn’t that uncertainty one of the great attractions of working as an artist?

Oh, I know, it’s so true. I look at this book and I want to make material things and I love the satisfaction of that process, but on the other hand I have these questions just now and they’re off in a completely different territory. We’ll see. It all comes around in some way. I suppose that’s what an inventory is—it’s where you see that everything is connected.