Beginning in 2013, Alexander James Hamilton initiated a series of solo expeditions across Siberia investigating the physical conditions through which crude oil and frozen river water become momentarily unified. Returning repeatedly over the following decade, including a major expedition in 2022, the project evolved into a sustained investigation of material behaviour, environmental tension and physical image construction under extreme conditions.
Working in prolonged isolation deep in the forests of Siberia in temperatures falling below minus 40 degrees Celsius, the works emerged through a process demanding precision, endurance and direct engagement with environments shaped simultaneously by natural systems and extractive industry.
Constructed using water, crude oil, freezing temperatures and time as both subject and mechanism, the resulting analogue photographs exist between abstraction, material physics and environmental witness.
The works record physical events directly onto film, creating transient structures in which crude oil, encountered in its extracted yet materially elemental state, becomes temporarily suspended within frozen aqueous systems before separating again.
These suspended conditions are brief and unstable. The photograph does not illustrate them; it fixes their occurrence.
The monochromatic images operate as contemporary memento mori, reflecting upon extraction, entropy and humanity’s accelerating relationship with resource consumption and environmental transformation.
What emerges is not representation but evidence: a material record of physical change occurring at the threshold between cohesion and separation.
“This blurring of boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture renders Hamilton’s works uncategorisable and eerily beautiful.”
Anna McNay writing for Studio International:
