Relate the Given to the Found: Exploring Ben Quashs Found Theology through

Ann Hamiltons Playful Participation in the event of a thread and the common SENSE
by Chelle Stearns

There is something that happens when you swing. Im sure there is a neurological
explanation for the sense of pleasure that you feel. Ann Hamilton1
[T]he unmanipulability of the Spirit makes living by its lights, entrusting oneself to it,
vertiginously unsettling. Ben Quash2

I occasionally invite my theology students to close their eyes and imagine, just for a
moment, that God is real, not confined to human perception (i.e., is other than us), and actively at
work in the world. This may seem like a strange set of statements for a theology professor to
utter, but I find, increasingly, that students struggle with this level of faith. At the core of this
struggle is the tension between divine and human agency. Human beings live at the juncture of
divine providence and creaturely freedom. Often sacrificed in the midst of the pull between the
divine and human in our theology is a full and robust engagement with the ongoing movement of
the Holy Spirit in the created order. Ultimately, it is difficult for my students to imagine that
within the frame of human history God can actively be God and, simultaneously, the created
order can have the freedom to be itself. For many, a theology of the Holy Spirit who is wild, free,
and unmanipulable feels both daunting and slightly oppressive in an age of extreme
individualism and self-determination.3
If my students find the Holy Spirit a bit daunting, then it is natural to assume that the
church, who is birthed by the work of the Spirit, would also be a circumspect subject. Every year
I attempt to get around what C. S. Lewis would call their watchful dragons when introducing a
theology of the church.4 It was in a moment of search and wonder about how to teach this subject

Chelle Stearns

that I stumbled across an article in the New York Times about Ann Hamiltons installation, the
event of a thread.5 As I explored this large-scale installation through images and video, I
immediately found my imagination immersed and invited into a world of curiosity and awe.6
This, I thought to myself, is what the church should feel like. Hamiltons work remains in my
imagination and continues to awaken a deep desire to participate in similar spaces of invitation
and play.

the event of a thread

Ann Hamiltons installation work, the event of a thread, spanned the breadth of a city
block in New York City at the Park Avenue Armory.7 The center point of the event of a thread
was a large white curtain connected to swings on either side of the cloth, raising and lowering
with the swings through a pulley system with counterbalances.8 The pull of the weight of every
person on the individual swings created a kind of turbulence in the curtain, responding to the
swing and play of what Hamilton refers to as the congregation.9 (NB: As the curtain ebbs and
flows in the middle of the room, it is amazingly illustrative of the Holy Spirit blowing, moving,
and responding to the turbulence in the interaction of the congregation.) In addition to the swings
and the curtain, there were two tables on either end. One table contained two readers reciting
from texts that changed daily (there were also a number of pigeons in cages on this table,
listening to the readers). These voices were heard through radios in paper bags and carried
throughout the exhibit, and seemed to pull the congregation into the intimacy of their shared
experience. At the table on the other side of the room sat a writer who was penning letters to
emotions and places far away. The letter writer had a mirror above her head through which she
could respond to what was happening in the room, evocative of the vital role of one who
observes and intercedes on our behalf.

All manner of people of all ages entered this space with something of a childish wonder
and abandon. As one young woman commented to Hamilton, she felt really, really wild, yet

Chelle Stearns

safe at the same time.10 In the videos we see people wandering, talking, laughing, swinging,
laying under the curtain (some sleeping), taking pictures, pondering, and listening. There is
something reminiscent of childhood play in the event of a thread, inviting each individual to
come explore as they will. Hamilton captures this playful allure in her artists statement: I can
remember the feeling of swinginghow hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at
furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt
momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain
and our torsos raised off the seat. We were sailing, so inside the motiontime stoppedand
then suddenly rushed again toward us. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the
sky, alone together.11
Hamiltons purposeful intersection of the social and the individual in collaborative play is
intriguing. In a recent talk at Town Hall in Seattle, WA, she said that much of her work in the
past ten years was spent exploring common spaces, the places in which we gather to listen alone
together.12 We start off in these places as you and I and in the process are invited to play
and become we. As Hamilton muses in a different interview, I think one of the things thats
here is that this is very intimate, and yet it is kind of large and anonymous. This kind of quality
of solitude, and being in a congregation or group of people. I think the feeling of that is actually
very comforting, and something that we need.13 Thus, we find in this, and other of Hamiltons
works during this period, evidence of a deep human longing to be connected to one another.
The significance of this for Hamilton was made explicit during an interview with Krista
Tippett, where she compares the sacred space of the church to that of a museum: you enter that
threshold and its a different space, and the air is different, and its maybe more quiet...14 She
goes on to talk about how these spaces hold the tactile and bodily memories of the many people
who have touched, looked, and listened in that same space, and something happens to us in this
encounter. Hamilton refers to this as a recognition that makes [your body] fall open. And when
you fall open to it, then your heart falls open15 as we are more open to the vulnerability of
being changed and transformed.

Chelle Stearns

Hamilton is advocating a haptic (or embodied) way of knowing. In this epistemology,

touch is the primary means of exploration. As she is fond of saying, her first hand is a sewing
hand, a textile hand. From a young age, she learned the touch of a needle in fabric, traversing the
realm of the seen and the unseen, as cloth was sewn together. In this process, fingers learn
directly what reason can only speculate. This haptic knowing is expanded as she contemplates
cloth as the first architecture of the body, helping us to know the boundaries of our own skin
through texture and feeland the boundaries of our social selves as we don the architecture
(clothing) of our families and communities.
Hamiltons second definition of touch, or haptic exploration, is contact. As discussed
earlier, touch opens up the body to take in new information. In infancy, it is touch that teaches us
to eat and drink as well as smile and love. As we get older, we form bonds with pets through the
touch of fur and warmth. Contact helps us to move the outside world into our inner world; we
become a part of that which transcends the self. As Hamilton articulates this, When we touch
we go from being observers to being included; things seen become felt.16
Hamiltons third definition of touch is through the ear and the eye. Something is touched
within us as we read and are read to. The words of poets and writers stir us and when this
happens we may be compelled to note, copy, or underline and often to share that touch by
passing the book from hand to handby reading out loudby sharing the page. The distance
between author and reader, and reader and reader diminishes as the capacity of words to compel
recognition travels from contact to contact, screen to screen, and perhaps from hand to hand.17
Words play a vital role in her imagination. Words hold our histories in significant ways,
connecting us to the past and to one another in the day to day.18 As she says of the event of a
thread, it is the exploration of the connection between text and textile.19
In all of this, the core action of wonder, amazement, and participation is never lost,
regardless of how one moves in and through her installations. The invitation of works such as the
event of a thread is to come, touch, swing, wander, listen, hear, feel, and lie beneath the dynamic
and multifaceted moving curtain at the center, again, so emblematic of the movement of the Holy

Chelle Stearns

Spirit in the created order. Mysteriously, we find ourselves connected in new ways with our deep
longings, our desire to connect with other people, and, possibly, our connection and necessity for
God.

(Con)Found Theology
There is something wondrous and beautiful in the experience of Hamiltons interactive
and playful art. We can draw many conclusions about the needs and the longings of the human
person, but when attempting to theologize from this place, we may want to incorporate multiple
facets into our theological exploration. As Karl Barth warns, one cannot speak of God simply
by speaking of [humanity] in a loud voice.20 This is especially true if one wants to assert, as we
did at the beginning of this paper, that God is not limited to our experience or perception of the
world. If God is at work in the created order, then our theology must give space and credence to
theological language that claims the active and unmanipulable agency of the triune God.
This is where Ben Quashs theology can give us some guidelines for artistic and haptic
ways of knowing. Quashs Found Theology is a bold theological consideration of the relationship
between history, imagination, and the Holy Spirit. He wonders in various manners how it is that
God interacts and enlivens human agency, interpretation, and artistry. He focuses on how the
human imagination encounters historical instances of turbulence and trauma, and how the Holy
Spirit enables dynamic and extraordinary insight and innovation during such moments in history.
Toward the beginning of Found Theology, Quash illustrates the purpose of his
theological exploration with the metaphor of a person carrying a well-stocked rucksack down a
trail. He argues that the found or the given of history is in the rucksack, and the path is
where and how the human imagination is engaged and finds meaning, that is what is found.
Thus, he claims, this path is the where the Holy Spirit invites humanity to relate the given to the
found.21This is the perennial question of how to relate innovation to tradition, that is, what is
good and proper innovation in light of how tradition has guided in the past.

Chelle Stearns

Core to this work is the development of an active pneumatology, which has enough
capacity to hold the ongoing activity of the Spirit in the world with the sometimes-vertiginous
awakening of the human imagination in the midst of the human story. In this pneumatology,
givens are not threatened or diminished by the findings along the path, because all Spirit-inspired
finding is a revelation of the active work of the one God revealed in Jesus Christ. The God of the
givens is the same God of the found.
One could call this work at the intersection of the givens and the found a theology
that confounds. The word confound has a curious double meaning, in that it can be either with
or against what is found. The etymology of the word is to pour together; to mix up, but this can
either (or simultaneously) mean confuse or amaze.22 Thus, to be confounded is to be surprised or
awakened. More practically, this can be an experience where one enters with one understanding
and in the process a new or divergent way of knowing is enlivened or roused. In Quashs
pneumatology, the Spirit is the person of the Trinity that disrupts our stayed ways of being and
releases unusual imaginative energy and awaken[s] exceptional creative resources to meet
humanity in even our deepest traumas.23 As he articulates elsewhere, the unmanipulability of
the Spirit makes living by its lights, entrusting oneself to it, vertiginously unsettling.24
Ironically, he argues, these disruptive, confounding experiences are often the very places where
we found our thinking and begin once more, to generate the basis for new settlements and new
theological thought.25
Quash moves between two major locations of this vertiginously unsettling work of the
Spirit in the Christian imagination. The first is in individual and cultural trauma.26 For example,
he provocatively refers to the founding trauma of modern English Christianity as the very
location of Thomas Vaughns fretful yet hopeful poetry.27 Thus, Vaughns Christian imagination
was enlivened by his cultural trauma without dismissing the seriousness of his sorrow and
misery. The second location of the Spirits work is in art itself, as he so eloquently articulates,
art which draws us to ask questions, which awakens desire or fear or hope or commitment in us,
which prompts our sympathetic imaginations to project different possible ways of living,

Chelle Stearns

speaking and relating, is art working in line with the coulds, shoulds, mays and wills of
our language-freighted existence. It thereby reconstitutes us (and equips us) as the historical
beings we really are, disciplining us against our habitual instinct to suppose that we live in a
fixed element.28 Thus, we are literally mixed or shaken up by our encounter with art and, we
might say with Hamilton, our bodies fall open, and when this happens our hearts fall open.

Confounding Foundness
At this point, we might want to pause and wonder, theologically, what is happening in
this interaction with Hamiltons installations. When I engage with her work, I find myself
contemplating what it means to be confounded. I realize that experience in space and time,
especially an immersive experience, both invites and confounds. To be confounded is to embody
the paradox of experience. The various and, seemingly, contradictory definitions of this word
point to (are emblematic of) the experience of being confounded. We walk into an experience,
thinking we understand the context or situation, but find ourselves surprised or mixed up. The
experience dislocates our assumptions yet it is the first step in finding new grounds for our ways
of thinking, what we might call a confounding foundness.
I experienced this kind of confounding foundness after taking one of my theology classes
to Hamiltons the common SENSE, housed at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of
Washington.29 Afterwards, I was sitting with the students in the museum caf, and our senses
were overloaded yet roused. Each student talked of reading, touching, hearing, and gathering as
they walked through the gallery spaces. Key to the experience was collecting quotations
(creating A Commonplace Book) about touch, animals, death, reading, and sound amongst
cozy folded blankets (emblazoned with an illustration from the childrens book, An Elegy on the
Death and Burial of Cock Robin) and displays of books, animals, animal skin clothing, and
archival images. Most impactful were the images of dead and collected animals that were
photocopied and hung on the walls of the main gallery, of which we could all choose one image
to tear off the wall and take home. The animals, all specimens from the collection of the Burke

Chelle Stearns

Museum of Natural History and Culture, held the history of the Pacific Northwest in their
feathers, fur, hands, claws, tails, and faces. These images also were a stark reminder of the sacred
life and death of every creature: once alive, they touched and were touched in return by the
world they inhabited and, through them, we touch our animal selves.30
Lingering at the corner of our minds during this conversation were the images and sounds
of theologies of the cross from our recent class engaging atonement and the arts. We discussed
how both Ann Hamilton and atonement theology invited us to contemplate the relationship
between life and death in the here and now. One student wondered how she had collected images
of Jesus over the years, curious how these images had formed and influenced her understanding
of faith and practice. Her theology of atonement was impacted by these images in unexamined
ways, but Hamiltons work had awakened her theological and artistic imagination all in one
moment. In all of my students, I witnessed a strange and wondrous working of the Spirit as they
struggled to relate the foundness (givenness) of their theology and practice to the finding of their
new awareness of the mutuality of life and death as they experienced it in the common SENSE.
Strangely, the person and work of Jesus seemed to be more full in our senses through this haptic
knowing.
As Quash might describe this experience, the givens only come alive in this indefinitely
extended series of encounters with new circumstances.31 He invites us to do theology at the
intersection of tradition and innovation, that is, at the intersection of history (scripture) and the
engagement of the Holy Spirit with the imagination of the reading community of the church.
Quash claims theology is most robust and alive when those in the church are engaged with the
Spirits work of relating the given to the found. He argues, that in the age of the pouring out of
the Spirit, we must live in the expectation of more findings still to come.32 Quashs God is
vibrantly Trinitarian and is always approaching.33 The Holy Spirit, in this model, is actively at
work placing things to be found in our path.34
Similarly, Ann Hamilton begins her artistic process with specific givens (e.g., cloth,
swings, or the body of regional animals) and then creates installations where participants are

Chelle Stearns

invited to haptically explore and discover. Much like in Quashs model, meaning and
interpretation happen at the intersection of the given and the found. There is inherent content
within what is given (e.g., cloth requires the crossing of threads or that death is ever present) yet
the veracity of the found is discernible only at the point of interaction with the found. Thus, what
we learn from Hamilton and Quash in dialogue is that the human imagination is made more open
and receptive to the work of the Spirit through ones participation and play with new
circumstances. Human beings require some kind of tangibility to live into, what Quash terms,
phronesis, a wisdom that emerges from practical knowing.35

Conclusion
It is significant that Quash periodically returns to discussions of the Eucharist in Found
Theology. This indicates that this deeply haptic ritual lingers in the back of his mind throughout
the book. It is as if he is signaling that we need to live in the space of worship if we are to
imagine, as he urges, a church that lives in enlivened expectation of the work of the Spirit. Thus,
we must also practice our faith in such a way that our senses are awakened and aroused to the
presence of God. The church in any denomination and in any era must, in this model, cultivate
ways and means to touch, listen, and explore new questions for today. We are to be ready to find
what the Spirit places in our path to be found. And as Hamilton might urge, we must be present
in sacred spaces, with our attention primed, so that through our curiosity our bodies, minds,
and hearts might fall open to the transformation awaiting us.

Ian Forster, Short: Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread, Exclusive on Art21, April 19, 2013, PBS, accessed
May 7, 2015, http://www.art21.org/artists/ann-hamilton/videos.
2

Ben Quash, Found Theology: History, Imagination, and The Holy Spirit (London & New York: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark), 2013, 256.
3
4

Ibid., 256.

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own
religion in childhood. Why did one find it hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the

Chelle Stearns 10

sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze
feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were
something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their
stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?
Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought I could (C. S. Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories
May Say Best Whats to Be Said, in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature [Mariner Books], 2002, 47).
5

Roberta Smith, The Audience as Art Movement: Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory, New York Times,
December 6, 2012, accessed May 7, 2015, http://nyti.ms/19aAwZV.
6

Here are a few of my favorite videos of Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread, December 5, 2012-January 6, 2013,
Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, accessed May 7, 2015:

New York Times: http://nyti.ms/UhyabS

ArtInfo: http://bcove.me/ax2zyb4z (my favorite video of this exhibit)

Art21: http://www.art21.org/artists/ann-hamilton/videos

Ann Hamiltons Website: http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/projects/armory.html

Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread, December 5, 2012-January 6, 2013, Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY.

Forster, Short: Ann Hamilton.

Philip Greenberg, Ann Hamiltons event of a thread, New York Times Video, December 6, 2012, accessed May
7, 2015, http://nyti.ms/UhyabS.
10

Forster, Short: Ann Hamilton.

11

Ann Hamilton, Artists Statement, the event of a thread, accessed May 7, 2015,
http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/images/projects/armory/Ann_statement_final.pdf.
12

Ann Hamilton, An Evening with Ann Hamilton, Town Hall, March 30, 2015, Seattle, WA.

13

Forster, Short: Ann Hamilton.

14

Ann Hamilton, Making, and the Space We Share, On Being, Feb. 13, 2014, accessed on May 3, 2015,
www.onbeing.org/program/ann-hamilton-making-and-the-spaces-we-share/6147.
15

Ibid. This is from earlier in the interview: I think theres something about the rhythm of the hands being busy and
then your body falls open to absorb and concentrate on what youre listening to, but not completely, because you
have two concentrations. And then from that, that sort of cultivates a kind of attention.
16

Ann Hamilton, On Touch, the common SENSE, October 11, 2014 April 26, 2015, Henry Art Gallery,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
17

Ibid.

18

Hamilton, Making, and the Space We Share.

19

Forster, Short: Ann Hamilton.

20

Karl Barth, The Word of God and The Word of Man, tr. by Douglas Horton, (New York: Harper), 1928 1957,
195.
21

Quash, Found Theology, xiv.

22

Confound, in The New Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 2010.

23

Quash, Found Theology, 169.

24

Ibid., 256.

25

Ibid., 169.

Chelle Stearns 11

26

I have been watching the mini-series Wolf Hall over the course of working on this paper. The mini-series does a
very good job of demonstrating just how confusing the beginning stages of the English reformationthe founding
traumareally was. In one scene, a man is sitting in church and stands after the reading of the text in Latin and
then recites it in English. This provoked shock, fear, confusion, and, ultimately, his death. Today, we so blithely
read the Bible in the vernacular all over the world, without a second thought to the controversial nature of Tyndales
first English translation, or the cost to those who first read this illegal and heretical version of the New Testament.
For an exploration of the art of Tyndales translation, see the second chapter in Found Theology.
27

Quash, Found Theology, 168. Vaughn lived at the point in English history when the Puritans has deemed illegal
the worship of the episcopally led church of England (170), thus his devotional and sacramental life was one of
forced isolation and exile.
28

Ibid., 168.

29

Ann Hamilton, the common SENSE, October 11, 2014 April 26, 2015, Henry Art Gallery, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA.
30

Hamilton, Artists Statement, the common SENSE.

31

Quash, Found Theology, xiv.

32

Ibid., 6.

33

Ibid., xvii.

34

Ibid., 15.

35

Knowing how to appeal to exemplars, but knowing how to appeal to them critically, is an essential part of the
power of finding well by which we also become wise in [our] actions for general well-being. Imagination is
essential to the process: in the course of such phronesis, you have to be able to imagine how something you knew
before can be adapted to fit some new circumstance (ibid., 261; quoting David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A
Theological Anthropology [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press], 2009, 520).