Artist Personal Statement
Moving back and forth across the scroll, the pair read in intervals of listening and speaking, in unison or counterpoint,
improvising a composition as each draws his or her own line from the paper’s column of text. In weaving, the thread
that floats free from the structure of the main body of cloth is called the supplementary weft, a line introducing
another pattern—often decorative—over a ground cloth. If its line is irregular, it is referred to as an errant line. Each
scroll contains the possibility of multiple readings, and each reading becomes an act of writing. If the scroll is warp
and the reader is weft, then the voice, transmitted to hand-carried paper bags, is a shuttle, whose reach is further
extended as the script streams silently on the web. Both radio and online transmissions offer the intimacy of a private
voice in a public arena. Words allow us to travel while the tactile keeps us present; a rhythmic exchange of reeling out
and pulling in that is also the swing’s pendulum.
At the eastern end of the hall and facing away from the white cloth, a writer, also seated at a wood table, responds to
the condition and weather of the room, the radio transmissions, the reading voices, and the space as seen in a mirror
reflection. The blank of the paper filled in time by letters addressed to qualities, emotions and places far away—Dear
Far, Dear Near, Dear Sadness, Dear Weight, Dear Time, Dear Here—accumulate on the table in the reverse tracings
of a carbon copy. The letters themselves, sealed, await their journey. While the words written remain silent, the
contact between the stylus and the paper is one of three live broadcast channels. The sound of a letter forming, the
point of a period, the pause, the unfurled line register as the contact between two surfaces and the hesitations of the
thinking body.
As the field of swings is bracketed by reading and writing, the interval of the day is bracketed by live song and its
recording. The maximum angle of a pendulum swinging away from its vertical point is called its amplitude. Amplitude
also refers to sound waves in air; sound is the second “cloth” of the work. At day’s end, a vocalist on the Juliet
balcony serenades the pigeons when released to flight. The plainsong, cut live to vinyl lathe—from center to outside
edge, a motion repeated when played each morning after—returns the recent past to the current moment. A different
singer on each successive day accretes, in turn, an additional record, and in time, a “chorus.” Song enchants the civic,
and the community of voices are archived by mechanisms and artifacts that have pragmatically and symbolically
served as connection points for communications technologies. The simple interlacing of human song and animal
song—the cooing of the pigeons and the singer’s vocalizations—perhaps remembers that at one time, animals lived in
the imagination as messengers, sometimes with oracular or sacrificial functions.
No two voices are alike. No event is ever the same. Each intersection in this project is both made and found. All
making is an act of attention and attention is an act of recognition and recognition is the something happening that is
thought itself. As a bird whose outstretched wings momentarily catch the light and change thought’s course, we attend
the presence of the tactile and perhaps most importantly—we attend to each other. If on a swing, we are alone, we are
together in a field. This condition of the social is the event of a thread. Our crossings with its motions, sounds, and
textures is its weaving; is a social act.
— Ann Hamilton
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