May 3 - November 2, 2025
We Will Sing
Salts Mill, Bradford, United Kingdom
Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture

Click here to watch The Hands of We Will Sing, a 15-minute film about the making of the project by Ali Lycett.

We Will Sing is a work of memory and imagining. Drawing on the origins of the textile processes that once filled this huge space, Hamilton’s site-responsive installation weaves together voice, song and printed word in a material surround made from raw and woven wool sourced from local textile companies H Dawson, based at Salts Mill, and William Halstead, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2025.

Curated by June Hill and Jennifer Hallam, We Will Sing features vocal and music collaborations with Emily Eagen and a new film created by Bradford-based filmmaker Ali Lycett that contextualises Hamilton’s practice and documents the making of the installation. A major engagement programme will include tours, readings, special events and an open invitation for us all to write a letter to the future, addressing the question at the heart of We Will Sing: What does the future need to know?

Click here to sumbit your letter to the future.

We Will Sing by Ann Hamilton was produced by Bradford 2025 in partnership with Salts Mill and supported by Arts Council England and William Halstead. Photo credits: Ann Hamilton Studio and David Lindsay.

October 3 - November 2, 2024
Figuring Luck
Elizabeth Leach Gallery

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Figuring Luck, an exhibition of recent works by Ann Hamilton. This new series of porcelain enamel portraits, produced with vintage scanning tools, expands upon the body of Hamilton’s ongoing work with alternative photographic modes of capture.

The subjects of Hamilton’s Figuring Luck are the roughly rendered forms of the ‘Fève’, miniature hand-painted ceramic figures traditionally baked into king’s cake for the Epiphany holiday. For the person who finds the figure in their cake, it signals luck and prosperity, and in some traditions, they are crowned queen or king for the day. While the literal translation of ‘fève’ is ‘bean’, the tradition has taken many forms, from the use of beans, to plastic king’s cake babies, to what Hamilton has captured in the portraits of Figuring Luck. The title takes its inspiration from this history, however, what interests Hamilton in the magnification of these inch-high sculptures is the expressive quality of these minimally articulated figures, scanned and cropped in conventional portrait proportions.

This is the latest series within the larger body of Hamilton’s image work using the vintage flatbed scanner as a photographic tool. The shallow depth of field produced by the scan creates an atmosphere pronouncing the voluminous character of the objects as shadow and blur, while simultaneously bringing into sharp focus the points at which the figure touches the glass. This dynamic shifting, between soft and hard lines, between light and shadow, is replicated in the shift between miniature and gigantic, as theses figures, who once began as small cartoonish abstractions, are now rendered as nearly human-scale, bringing with them all that is minimally necessary to form the recognition of a figure: the hint of an eye or an arm, a grin or a frown, and perhaps to suggest an emotion of contentment or melancholy. Hamilton turns her interest in the relation between the animate and the inanimate, the miniature and the gigantic, toward figuring the figure itself.
A related work of gigantic puppet-like figures will open in the Winter of 2024/25 as part of Seattle’s Public Art Program.

8 November 2024 – 2 March 2025
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
National Gallery of Canada

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century. Although at times unevenly weighted, the diverse exchanges, alignments, affiliations, and affinities that have brought these art forms into dialogue constitute an ongoing if intermittent narrative in which one art repeatedly impacts and even redefines the other. In short, the relationship between abstract art and woven textiles can best be described as co-constitutive, and their histories as interdependent. With over 150 works by an international and transhistorical roster of artists, this exhibition reveals how shifting relations among abstract art, fashion, design, and craft shaped recurrent aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political forces, as they, in turn, were impacted by modernist art forms.

September 2023
Installation of LIFE with LIFE completed
Oregon State University's Cordley Hall
Corvallis, Oregon

Fabrication: Western Interlock
Installation: Sequoia Stonescapes
Images by Nathan Wright