Back in December, I wrote about a rule I hadn't expected in Ann Hamilton's exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. The rule was that you were only allowed to tear down one print from the wall to take home.

Originally, when the exhibition first opened in October, you were allowed to take as many prints as you wanted. The prints were made from scans of actual dead animals in the collection at the Burke Museum of Natural History. Many of the animals are endangered or extinct, so people might think twice about decimating the galleries with their pictures. As a visitor, your individual decision added up to a collective you might not see, so you had some calculating to do. What the gallery looked like at the end, and how it changed all along, was part of the show.

But the opening threw the museum and the artist for a loop. People took so many that the one-only rule was imposed. What did the Ohio-based artist—who's also working on a large installation for the Seattle waterfront—think?

I asked her by phone last week.

Hi, Ann. Thanks for taking the time.

Sure. I've got a little break here... I'm collaborating with Anne Bogart. We're opening a new piece on the 23rd of April. It's at the Wexner Center [at Ohio State], and it's part of their anniversary. Very early on, in fact when I first moved back to Ohio, Anne was one of the artists in residence here. It's so great to work with the company and to jump into a very different context.

What are you making?

It's perhaps a little abstract. But we're doing a project in a twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium but it's with an audience of two hundred and fifty. It begins with a traditional proscenium... and then everyone comes onstage. We're working with the Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse, which is full of interior, interior, interior... so it's totally different from Seattle, but it continues some of those questions about how does the act of solitary reading become shared.

Let's get right to it. Tell me how you felt about the take-one rule in Seattle.

We made the commitment to have the project up for six months, and I think there was a lot of surprise about how [many prints] left the building in the opening. ... We were trying to balance allowing the system put in place to play itself out, and on the other hand going, oh my gosh, are we doing nature conservancy? What if nothing is here in three months or two months?

You know, the whole thing is an experiment... I was talking about it in the tour that I gave [in March]. You can't overdetermine the nature of some sorts of exchange. It has to be structured but open. Where we came out of that is to trust the process, to let it play itself out.

So the signs are gone now?

Yes. You can't really offer something and say, well, this is how you're supposed to use it. But on the other hand, how do you preserve so there's something there for someone else? ... I think those [take-one-only] signs went down maybe in January or February.

At that point, you felt there would be enough to get to the end of the exhibition.

Partly. But it was also about trusting the system, trusting the work, and trusting people. I think there's always a tension between trusting a process and wanting to hold onto an image.

It wasn't so much about what do the galleries look like, but what's the energy in there. A friend of mine who was out there I think in January, she said she was in the galleries and she saw three different people go up to the last image of a mallard on the wall, realize it was the last image, and then take their hand away and leave it.

So I think it's so individual, but I can say I've learned a tremendous amount by all the ways this asks for participating, and that delicacy of directing and allowing. I go in there now and I see the empty ones, and they say everything.

At the opening, there was some pretty gymnastic behavior. People were on people's shoulders grabbing for things and it was like, oh, what have we unleashed. Nina [Bozicnik], the assistant curator there, she was always really great with me saying, "You know, that was the opening, let's just let it settle." The nature of this kind of work is that you don't even know what it is. You're opening, and it's barely in place, and there's a process of letting the piece teach you back what it means.

The show closes April 26. Do you feel like it's ready to close? How does it end?

Oh, that's really hard for me to answer. ... One of the things I feel is, I guess, very proud is maybe the right word, I don't know, maybe the wrong word. But when you walk in, I guess I feel the museum is full of air and light that wasn't there before. And that's something.

Switching over to the waterfront, any more idea what you're making there?

I can't describe its form, because there's a lot of questions about the pier itself right now. But I know it will come from the intersection of what is already there, just as the Henry project came from the intersection of the Burke, the library, what was there. ...

It will be like what is here, and how can it be focused? How does attention focus within that? It's like when a threshold narrows, like when you walk into a cathedral space, the volume of that space feels even greater than it is. So what does it mean when you're outside and looking up at the sky and feeling that volume? Maybe if you narrow the experience of looking up, that volume gets amplified.

Interviewer's note: Hamilton does work with sound, and this moment in the interview would have been the perfect opportunity to ask her about the double meanings of the word "volume" and whether sound will be part of what happens on the waterfront. But I didn't, and she had to go back to rehearsal.