In his Vanitas works, Alexander James Hamilton re-visits the works of the seventeenth-century Dutch Masters using period props, food and real insects including butterflies that he breeds himself. Each carefully staged underwater scene is captured entirely in-camera without the use of digital post-production.
Working with subtle distortions of light and movement from the water’s own wave energy to create a unique painterly effect, the subjects appear suspended within a black void that neither interferes with nor disrupts the subject matter. Hamilton further explores these themes through the introduction of water, acting as both nurturer and destroyer, with the power to cleanse and reinvent, or to drown and disappear.
Ultimately, by transforming the genre’s inherent symbolic language, these Vanitas works act as reflection on life and mortality, questioning their meaning within a society dominated by materialism.
— Jessica Draper, curator, Pertwee Anderson & Gold, London.
