Drawing from the symbolic language of seventeenth-century Dutch Vanitas painting, Alexander James Hamilton constructs underwater still life tableaux in which flowers, food, objects and living specimens become suspended within controlled fields of water and light. Created entirely in-camera and resolved directly onto analogue film, each work emerges through physical construction without post-production.

Using highly purified water as both optical condition and material environment, Hamilton reorganises familiar symbolic forms through duration, movement and controlled distortion. Subjects appear momentarily detached from ordinary space, occupying an uncertain state between preservation and disappearance.

The works investigate how meaning accumulates around objects and how symbolic systems persist across time. Water becomes both agent and witness, altering relationships between surface, structure and perception while recording transient conditions directly onto film.

The resulting images exist between still life, sculpture and photography, extending the Vanitas tradition through material process and constructing spaces in which mortality, transience and transformation remain in continuous negotiation.

As curator Jessica Draper observed: “By transforming the genre’s symbolic language, these works reflect upon life and mortality within contemporary culture.”