"Habitus is Hamilton's first major exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum. We have collaborated twice before, the last being on her project for the American Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). These installations are surely among the most memorable ever to grow out of our Artist-in-Residence Program and we are thrilled to present this very ambitious dual-sited exhibition,” says Susan Lubowsky Talbott, interim executive director.

"Ultimately, habitus continues Hamilton's ongoing practice, one that connects "text" to "textile" through their shared root in language and in the physical nature of reading and sewing as the eye and hand move across a plane. Both activities are immersive and also intimate,” Talbott concludes.

Hamilton elaborates, "Cloth is the body’s first architecture; it protects, conceals, and reveals; it carries a body’s weight, swaddles at birth, covers in sleep and in death. When we speak of its qualities, we speak of a cloth’s hand: we know it through touch. Its felt experience is evoked and described by the other hand that we always inhabit, that of language."

Hamilton began this project by exploring Philadelphia’s textile collections and visiting some of its generations- old textile producers. Seeing looms that have been in operation for decades and watching raw material become a single thread, then a warp, and then a weft of a cloth: these experiences inspired the making of habitus.
“Just as cloth is a structure binding individual threads into a larger whole, this project encourages associative links between historical objects, literary excerpts, textile processes, and their individual forms of knowledge and experience,” says the artist. 

THE EXHIBITION Municipal Pier 9
For the installation, Municipal Pier 9 is open to the air, the breeze, and the weather on the Delaware River.

Rope and pulley mechanisms, inspired by the systems in cathedral bell towers, and activated by viewers set curtains spinning into motion. “The hand, listening to the ear, must know when to pull, when to hold and when to let go. The pattern of letting go and catching: that’s the sounding, the counting time of the body,” says Hamilton.
Hamilton describes reading as an essential element of her practice: “The immersive, broadly associative thinking engendered by the solitary, silent act of reading is, for me, a “making” space. I have come to wonder how the “invisible” experience that is the act of reading might become a form of materialized making, how the way one reads might be thought of as a form of drawing.”

Beyond the curtains’ classical drape or romantic engulfing billow, two poems written by Philadelphia poet Susan Stewart, CHANNEL and MIRROR, are projected onto a shipping container where wood benches invite silent reading. The reeling, pulsing words suggest the time and timelessness of a river’s flow: sweet water running, meeting, and merging with the ocean’s salt.
Habitus at Municipal Pier 9 is presented in association with 2016 Fringe Festival. 

In the Museum
While the installation at Municipal Pier 9 is on the scale of landscape, the three floors Hamilton transforms in The Fabric Workshop and Museum are on the scale of thread, needle, book, and bed. The Museum’s galleries display a number of digital prints by Hamilton, along with a selection of historical objects—including literary commonplace books, textile sample books, dolls, and needlework portfolios—borrowed from Philadelphia museums and public collections.
The Design Center at Philadelphia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rosenbach Museum & Library, and Winterthur Museum Garden & Library generously allowed Hamilton access to their collections to choose objects to include in habitus.

Many of the objects collected by the artist are fragments of cloth and text. Hamilton is attracted by their color and their pattern, but more so by the potential of fragments to represent the material record of individual hands and to suggest the possibility of transformation. A picture of past lives—that of seamstresses, weavers, fabric printers, and individual makers—is evoked throughout the three floors. Lace samplers, fabric swatch books, and commonplace books are on view, alongside a collection of 19th century hand-woven blankets.

In addition to the display of historic collections, Hamilton worked with early-generation flatbed and wand scanners as tools to image the objects and generate a new series of prints, which render the objects’ tactility.
In its totality, this compendium of objects is the vision of an artist who says that her first hand was a sewing hand and who engaged with artifacts from the past to create this project.
On Tumblr: cloth ? a commonplace 

About the Artist
Ann Hamilton is internationally recognized for her large scale, multi-media installations, including the event of a thread, which was staged in 2012 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Born in Lima, Ohio, Hamilton studied the textile arts at the University of Kansas before earning a MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. Hamilton has received a National Medal of Arts, MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Award, and was chosen to represent the United States at the 1991 Sao Paulo Biennial and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, Ohio. She is currently a Distinguished University Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.