In the Glass series, Alexander James Hamilton developed a process through which pigment is removed from the capillaries of flower petals and replaced with highly purified water, revealing only skeletal fibres and underlying vascular networks. The resulting works transform one of art history's most familiar subjects into studies of transparency, mortality and form.
Constructed entirely in-camera and without digital manipulation, the works use water not as subject but as an active optical condition through which light, pressure and duration reorganise the image. Exposure records these interactions directly onto film, producing photographs that hover between preservation and disappearance, anatomical exposure and abstraction.
What emerges is not a depiction of the flower but a reorganisation of its structure. Veins, membranes and residual traces become visible as architecture, rendering the rose simultaneously fragile, geological and almost impossible in its material presence.
As Mark Sinclair, Editor of Creative Review, observed: "The capillaries are on view like flesh stripped of skin, making the flowers look very vulnerable and redoubling the air of mortality evoked."
