Elocution #1

From installation and new media to photography and print, Ann Hamilton carefully chooses materials and processes based on historical research and poetic associations. Her finished works reflect planning and expert craftsmanship, but they are often ephemeral and embrace chance and contingency. A longtime professor at Ohio State University, Hamilton regularly blurs the line between viewer and participant or collaborator and works with students and volunteers to help produce larger works. “Elocution #1” is from a suite of sixteen unique diptychs conceived at Island Press with printmaking students from Washington University (where Island Press is based). Contemplating words selected from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Circles” and Frank Honeywell Fenno’s 1912 treatise “Fenno’s Science of Speech,” the students (and later, Ann’s studio assistants) created drawings based on diagrams from the latter text. The drawings were reproduced as photopolymer printing plates, which were then used to transfer pigment from blue commercial transfer paper and handmade iron oxide transfer paper to sheets of fibrous gampi paper. Finally, Hamilton formed diptychs by selecting, arranging and layering examples of the used transfer papers and printed gampi paper. “Elocution #1” is composed of one sheet of blue carbon paper and two semi-transparent sheets of gampi paper, the latter with word diagrams printed in blue or iron oxide pigments on their rectos and versos. Hamilton layered the gampi sheets so that the printed diagrams, visible through the thin paper, visually intermingle. A portfolio folder and a printed colophon accompany the three sheets, which, as the colophon explains, “echo in cloud-like formations the chattering singing and sounds of their process.”