Ann Hamilton often uses organic materials like fabric or hair to address issues of memory, loss, protection, and vulnerability. For her, language is the key to retaining ideas and culture, symbolized here by the hand-sewn alphabet along the inside of a collar. In contrast, horsehair around the outside is wild and untamed. The labor-intensive tidiness of the sewn alphabet and the free-flowing outer ring evoke tensions between minute, controlled actions and surrounding chaos that are recurrent in Hamilton's work. According to the artist, "Textiles are making skins, and skins are about that border, that permeable edge of the body."

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