The Atlas

A geographic record of exhibitions, fieldwork, residencies, research, publications and films spanning four decades of practice. Each location opens an archival record and its related material.

• A BEAUTIFUL ANNOUNCEMENT OF DEATH, 2012 (exhibition). Presented at Pertwee Anderson & Gold Gallery, London, from 11 May to 15 June 2012, *A Beautiful Announcement of Death* brought together a body of work constructed and photographed within dark tanks of purified water. The physical scenes were meticulously made for the camera and, including couture dress making, skulls and a golden halo for the most part, subsequently dismantled or destroyed, leaving the photographic transparencies as their only surviving record. The exhibition drew upon the Vanitas tradition of Pieter Claesz and made direct reference to John Everett Millais’ *Ophelia* and Paul Delaroche’s *La Jeune Martyre*. The story of Ophelia provided its central figure, bringing art-historical representations of mortality into dialogue with personal experience. Water operated simultaneously as material, optical condition and historical metaphor. The contemporary catalogue described its apparent contradiction through Heraclitus: the element associated with continual change becomes the means through which an otherwise transient construction is preserved. Photography is consequently described as “a kind of sorcery which successfully presences the past and yet only brings up ghosts.”
• DARK VAT: A CENTRE WITHOUT PERIPHERY — OLEG DEETZ, 2020 (publication). Published in August 2020, this essay is the account of artist and curator Oleg Deetz, one of twelve artists who took part in the 2019 Dark Vat residency in Krasnoyarsk. Established within a disused Soviet photographic paper factory, the residency brought twelve distinct practices into a shared industrial space, with much of the work constructed from materials found within the building itself. Deetz considers Dark Vat through the idea of dialogue: between artist and space, artist and event, and between the artists themselves. For Krasnoyarsk, he describes the concentration of twelve different approaches within a single place and time as something that cannot be understood through the conventional distinction between centre and province. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, he describes the residency instead as “a centre without a periphery.” Written by a participant rather than retrospectively from outside the residency, the paper preserves a contemporary account of Dark Vat as both a working environment and a temporary community: twelve individual practices remaining distinct while contributing to a collective image.
• OIL + WATER: MULTIPLICATION BY ARTICULATION — OLEG DEETZ, 2021 (publication). Published in August 2021, this essay by artist and curator Oleg Deetz examines Oil + Water through its physical construction from oil, water and ice. Deetz relates the direct use of these primary materials to Constructivism and Brutalism, and describes a process he calls “multiplication by articulation”: the repeated construction of variations through which a problem becomes increasingly difficult to overlook. Central to the essay is Deetz’s account of why photography enters the process. The structures formed through oil, water and ice are inherently temporary and cannot be preserved in their original state. Photography becomes the means through which the event can remain, while light is identified as a third component, conveying information about the relationships between the materials and the conditions under which they met. The paper extends beyond the individual series to consider the studio as a place of exchange between artists and viewers. Written after Deetz’s participation in the 2019 Dark Vat residency, it provides a contemporary critical reading of both the material practice and the collaborative structures surrounding it.
• USE OF WATER, 2017 (publication). Paul Carey-Kent's catalogue essay Alexander James: Use of Water considers All Icons Are False through the longer development of a practice centred on water, Vanitas and the physical construction of the photographic image. For the series, 850 analogue plate-film photographs were made from 50 floral arrangements constructed underwater. Positive and negative plates were subsequently brought together, allowing movement, misalignment, drying, dust and the interaction of water and organic material to remain visible within the resulting works. Carey-Kent describes the process as “a sequence of semi-controlled accidents”, relating its contingent effects to process-based abstract painting and drawing comparisons with Gerhard Richter and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The essay also traces the wider work through Dutch still life, the Pre-Raphaelites and Caravaggio, with water recurring as both physical medium and subject.
• AN ENGLISHMAN IN MOSCOW, 2014 (publication). Published by BRIC Magazine during the development of Rastvorennaya Pechal, this extended interview documents the relocation of an entire photographic production to Moscow and the working principles behind the Red October studio. The article records the decision to produce the exhibition in Russia rather than transport completed works into the country. Local materials and fabrication were incorporated into the production, while the studio itself was developed around large water systems and the particular technical demands of making the photographs. Significantly, the interview provides an early published account of water being approached not simply as subject matter but as an active physical system. Discussing the process, James describes spending “hours looking at the way the water moves and how it interacts with certain pieces.” The article similarly describes a practice involving temperature gauges, purified water and the preservation of materials, characterising the work as crossing the boundaries between sculpture, photography and science. Published more than a decade before the later theoretical writings, the interview provides a contemporary record of ideas that would become increasingly explicit within the practice: the construction of conditions before the photograph, sustained observation of material behaviour, and the studio understood as an experimental environment.
• ANDREY TOLSTOY: RASTVORENNAYA PECHAL, 2014 (publication). Published by Triumph Gallery, Moscow, in 2014, Andrey Tolstoy’s essay, “Distil Ennui“ to accompanied the exhibition *Rastvorennaya Pechal*. An academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, Tolstoy places the works within the long relationship between photography and painting, citing Zurbarán, Millais’ *Ophelia* and Delaroche’s *The Young Martyr*. Drawing on Johan Huizinga’s writing on play, he considers the artist’s construction of images and the viewer’s part in reading them. The essay was published in the exhibition catalogue, issued in an edition of 500 copies for *Rastvorennaya Pechal* at Triumph Gallery, Moscow, April–May 2014.
• ANIMAE BY VERNON PRESS, 2018 (publication). Written by Emma Coccioli and published in 2018 by Vernon Press, Animae: The Invisible Sources of the Artwork brings together conversations with contemporary artists from around the world, examining the psychological, philosophical and moral foundations of artistic practice through the writings of James Hillman and the enduring influence of Romantic thought. The volume features an extended illustrated interview exploring photography, authorship, memory, mortality, environmental responsibility and the relationship between art, perception and the natural world. Situated within a broader interdisciplinary discussion of contemporary culture, ecology and the role of the artist in society, the conversation records many of the ideas that would later evolve into The Photograph as Event, offering an early published account of photography understood as the consequence of physical conditions rather than representation alone. Animae: The Invisible Sources of the Artwork Emma Coccioli Published 2018
• ART LIVES HERE - SOBAKA MAGAZINE, 2019 (publication). Published during Dark Vat, Art Lives Here documents the development of the artist residency within 600 square metres of industrial space in Krasnoyarsk, transformed for seven weeks into a shared creative laboratory. An initiative that was created, funded and organised by the artist alone. The article records a deliberately open residency model in which younger artists worked alongside more experienced practitioners without a conventional master-and-pupil structure. Participants were encouraged to develop their own practices through experimentation, exchange and access to a common working environment. The title Dark Vat, an anagram of the old photographic paper factory name Kvadrat, referred both to the central black-water reflection pool and to the residency itself: individual artists operating as distinct elements within a shared environment, interacting to produce outcomes that could not have been predetermined or achieved independently. One outcome by one artist could be taken up and transformed within the practice of another, a process described at the time as “like acid flavoured ping pong balls bouncing off the wall.” Published while the residency was active, the feature provides a contemporary account of Dark Vat as a constructed creative environment in which the conditions for collaboration were established, while the resulting work was allowed to remain open.
• ARTDAILY: RASTVORENNAYA PECHAL, 2014 (publication). Published by ArtDaily in April 2014, this contemporary account accompanied the opening of Rastvorennaya Pechal at Triumph Gallery and documented the relocation of the studio to Moscow for the production of the exhibition. The article describes the photographs as beginning with sculptural compositions made from natural materials and handmade elements, constructed within large tanks of purified water and “photographed as a documentary act” before the original compositions were destroyed. It identifies the manipulation of light and the surface tension of water as integral to the resulting image, placing the work between photography, painting and sculpture. The publication also records the Red October studio as occupying part of the former chocolate factory on Bolotny Island, then an important centre for contemporary art. It states that although the site had hosted exhibitions by organisations including Gagosian Gallery, Baibakov Art Projects and the Moscow Biennale, this was the first time the island had housed an artist and working studio. Placed within the 2014 UK–Russia Year of Culture, the article records the decision to produce the exhibition entirely in Russia using locally sourced materials. It further notes that, while Triumph Gallery had previously presented British artists including Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, this was the only British solo exhibition there for which the works themselves had been produced in Russia.
• I DON'T WANT TO LAST FOREVER, YOU TOLD ME NOT TO FADE, 2015 (residency). FILM ONE Produced during an Artist Residency developed with Chainy, the film emerged from a four week collaborative experiment bringing together artists and creative practitioners co-selected with John Pallant, Regional Creative Director for Saatchi & Saatchi EMEA. The residency explored the studio as laboratory and the residency itself as a creative system. Artists working across moving image, sound, sculpture, music, writing and photography developed work through direct engagement with materials, processes and one another, without a predetermined outcome. At its centre was a large flooded space of black water, conceived as a shared working environment through which individual and collaborative works could develop. ´I Don't Want to Last Forever, You Told Me Not to Fade´ was one of the films to emerge from this environment, performed by Georgina Dugdale and written by Sophie Fenella Robins. the artists were.. Daniel McBride (composer.musician) Rae Howell (composer.musician) Katie Olds (camera operator.editor) Sophie Fenella Robins (creative writer) Sophie Newstead (creative writer) Charli Parker (production design assistant) James Butler (camera operator.editor) Eloise Stevens (creative writer)
• ARTNET ASKS - INTERVIEW, 2017 (publication). Published by Artnet News in 2017 during the London exhibition Death of the Dream, this extended interview provides an important account of a practice moving decisively away from photography understood as a reproducible medium. The discussion records the decision, publicly announced in 2013, to cease producing editions and make only unique photographic works. The position challenged photography's inherent reproducibility by treating each finished photograph as a singular object whose material provenance begins long before the exposure itself. The interview also documents the physical construction underlying the images. Sets, objects, flowers, clothing and other fabricated elements, cultivated or assembled in the studio before being documented in water on analogue film. Nothing appearing within the image could exist solely as a photographic or post-production effect. Discussing Grace, a single work requiring a year of preparation: the stool was turned by hand, the terracotta vessel made and fired in the studio, and historically specific flowers cultivated before only two 8 × 10 inch film plates were exposed and the constructed scene destroyed. Read retrospectively, the interview provides an early published articulation of principles that would become increasingly explicit within the later practice: the photograph as the consequence of a constructed physical event, the importance of material provenance, and the rejection of reproducibility in favour of the unique photographic object.
• BENEATH THE SURFACE, 1987 (exhibition). One of the earliest public projects to demonstrate that photography need not remain a passive record of events. Developed in response to the destruction of coral reef systems caused by coastal development in the Dominican Republic, the exhibition questioned the environmental cost of tourism expansion and the irreversible loss of marine ecosystems in pursuit of economic growth. Independently organised at the Panteón de la Patria, Santo Domingo, the exhibition was attended by the Minister for Tourism and the Minister for Ecology. Its criticism of government policy resulted in the artist's arrest and imprisonment. Produced at the age of twenty, the project marked a decisive shift in the understanding of photographic practice. The photograph was no longer simply capable of describing the world; it had entered it, producing material and political consequences beyond the image itself.
• BLOUIN ARTINFO: THE MOVE TO MOSCOW, 2013 (publication). Published by BLOUIN ARTINFO Russia on 4 November 2013, Nastassia Astrasheuskaya’s interview records the preparations for the relocation of the London studio to Moscow on 28 November, where the works for Rastvorennaya Pechal would be conceived and produced in advance of the 2014 exhibition at Triumph Gallery. The exhibition would place the work among a small number of British artists to have presented major projects with the gallery, following Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers. The move followed more than a year of direct engagement with Moscow. An unsolicited portfolio had been sent to institutions including Triumph and Garage, followed by a four-day visit in September 2013 and meetings with eight galleries. Rather than producing the exhibition in London and transporting it to Russia, the studio itself was relocated. The decision allowed place to become part of the conditions of production: the works would be constructed in Moscow, drawing upon its materials, cultural references and immediate environment. Earlier studio relocations to Tokyo, New York and Australia are discussed in similar terms, each having altered the character of the work made there. The interview also preserves a detailed account of the physical methodology behind the forthcoming works. Handmade dresses, custom tank systems and human skulls are described alongside the earlier growing of flowers and breeding of butterflies within the studio. The Transparency of a Dream, series took its initial form on transparent photographic film during the exhibition. “Everything has to exist physically in front of the camera before I can begin.”
• BURO 24/7: RED OCTOBER STUDIO INTERVIEW, 2014 (publication). An interview at the studio during the exhibition Rastvorennaya Pechal at Triumph Gallery, this illustrated studio interview documents the working conditions and ideas surrounding the Moscow period. The article records the physical construction of the photographs within the Red October studio: materials were grown, fabricated and assembled before being submerged within tanks of purified water and photographed without subsequent digital manipulation. The publication describes this method as a scientific process, providing an independent contemporary account of the material and experimental basis of the practice. The interview also records an emerging concern with water not simply as an environment for the subject, but as an active optical material: “It is not the completely black water that interests me first of all, but the reflections within it.” Discussing memory, mortality and the description of the work as “tragic baroque”, the interview concludes with a succinct statement of intent: “My art is like poetry: it is made to remember.”
• CHAOS IN RESIDENCE, 2015 (residency). Eloise Stevens · 2015 Written from within the 2015 Artist Residency developed with Chainy and Saatchi & Saatchi, Chaos in Residence provides a participant's account of the experimental studio environment and the collaborative works that emerged from it. Eight practitioners working across writing, composition, moving image and production were selected from approximately 270 applicants. Rather than working towards a predetermined outcome, they entered a prepared underwater studio in which materials, disciplines and ideas were allowed to interact and develop through sustained experimentation. Stevens records the residency as an attempt to examine what might happen when normally separate creative practices were brought into direct contact. The flooded black-water environment became a common working space from which photographs, films, writing, performances and compositions developed independently and collaboratively. Her account also contains an early observation of the relationship between photography, event and duration within the practice. Describing the photographs as singular moments and the films, music and literature developing around them as temporal forms, she writes: “If his stills are space, then, it seems, the films, music, and literature created around them provide time.” Seen retrospectively, the text documents an early experiment in the studio as a constructed system: establishing physical and collaborative conditions without prescribing their outcome, then allowing the resulting works to emerge through the interactions between people, materials, water, light and time.
• CLIMATE WEEK INSTALLATION, 2017 (exhibition). Presented during World Climate Week London, *Breaking the Plastic Habit* occupied the Sir Norman Foster-designed roof garden at Canary Wharf. The installation brought material recovered from the coral reefs and shorelines of the Maldives into the centre of London’s financial district. The works formed part of *Visions from the Shoreline*, developed following a return to the Maldives in 2017. Working across the Maldivian Atolls in make shift island studios, plastic waste and other foreign material were recovered while free-diving and placed directly onto photographic film. The resulting camera-less PhotoGrams were exposed using moonlight, the setting sun and available light within the landscape. Twenty illuminated works from the project were subsequently donated to fund the infrastructure of a community-led plastic recycling facility in the Maldives, connecting the material recovered during the expedition directly to the means proposed for processing it.
• CMM NEWSCAST - RENACIENDO , 2020 (film). Developed between 2019 and 2021, Renaciendo reopened Budia's former Carmelite convent to the public after more than 170 years, transforming a roofless Baroque ruin into a temporary museum-standard exhibition and cultural space. Working alone on the space but collaborating externally alongside local authorities and regional institutions, the project involved thousands of hours work by the artist including site clearance, structural preparation, and the design and fabrication of a bespoke lighting system made entirely from recycled aluminium collected from the local community. Rather than restoring the building as an architectural object alone, Renaciendo reactivated it as a place of culture, public participation and environmental awareness. The project was later examined by Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián within the context of Creative Ruralism, recognising it as a model of cultural regeneration through artistic practice. He described the work as: "Alexander James Hamilton is a rare transversal artist, committed to society and nature, Renaissance in attitude."
• GUILDHALL GALLERY - CONTEMPORARY STILL LIFE, 2017 (exhibition). Presented at the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, in 2017, the exhibition brought contemporary approaches to still life into direct conversation with works by historical masters from the museum collection including Alexander James Hamilton’s *The Great Leveller* (2010), from the *Vanitas* series. Curated by Michael Petry, the exhibition moved from the apparent beauty and abundance traditionally associated with still life towards its underlying preoccupation with mortality and decay. “It’s death. It’s always been all about death,” Petry told *The Guardian*, describing the flowers at the beginning of the exhibition as the “peak of perfection and beauty” before the presence of mortality increasingly revealed itself. *The Great Leveller*, depicting a human skull among period tulips and a morph blue butterfly, was selected as the lead image for Maeve Kennedy’s *Guardian Art Review* article, “A matter of still life and death in Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition,” published on 28 August 2017.
• NUEVA ALCARRIA - CONVENTO, 2021 (publication). Published by Nueva Alcarria in August 2021, this survey of the history and cultural heritage of Budia looks back on the reopening of the former Carmelite convent and the exhibition held there the previous year. The article records the intervention as an important moment for the town, with the mayor describing its contribution to restoring the building to the public after being closed for over 170 years and for the exhibition that attracted 1,000´s of visitors setting the path in place with intellectual and university stakeholders to conserve the cultural future of the site. Published a year after the project, the article provides a local record of the building acquiring a renewed cultural function beyond the original exhibition.
• DESIGNING A CIRCULAR FUTURE CASABLANCA, 2015 (research). A research programme developed through a series of university workshops in Casablanca examining circular design, distributed manufacturing and material reuse. Participants explored 3D scanning, digital modelling and additive manufacturing as practical tools for extending the life cycle of everyday materials. Rather than remaining a theoretical exercise, the research became the foundation for Makers Place, where many of these ideas were realised at full scale through the design and construction of the Maldives' first carbon neutral aluminium and plastic recycling facility. The project marked an important transition from artistic research towards the creation of permanent environmental infrastructure, demonstrating how creative practice can generate practical systems with measurable ecological impact.
• CREATIVE REVIEW: DEAD OR ALIVE?, 2013 (publication). Published by Creative Review in October 2013, Dead or Alive? returned to the practice four years after the magazine's 2009 Taxi Monograph, documenting the development of Glass and a new underwater process using living roses. Following four months of experimentation, the article describes a three-stage process extending over five days, governed by chemical treatment, water pressure, highly purified water and precise temperature control. The pigment within the rose petals was gradually replaced by transparent water, revealing their underlying skeletal structure while the flower remained alive. The specimen was typically photographed on the sixth day. Discussing the role of water in the resulting photographs: “The aesthetic I’m interested in is about using the painterly effect of what the mechanics of water can do to the work.” The article also records a dedication to in-camera purity: “What I’m doing, what you see is what you get, there’s no post production or digital trickery.”
• CREATIVE REVIEW MONOGRAPH: TAXI SERIES, 2009 (publication). Published as the August 2009 edition of Monograph by Creative Review, this dedicated publication presented photographs made across Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, examining illuminated taxi signs and their reflections against the movement and artificial light of the city. Beyond its record of the series, the publication provides an early written account of principles that would become increasingly important to the later practice. The accompanying text states that the photographs were presented “as shot” and identifies a dedication to “in-camera purity” as a predominant concern. Process is described as cathartic rather than critical, locating the making of the photograph within direct physical experience rather than subsequent manipulation. Published four years before the move to unique photographic works, the text forms an important timestamp in the development of an approach that would later become more explicitly concerned with photography as the material record of constructed conditions. Here, those conditions remain those encountered within the city: moving vehicles, reflective surfaces, artificial illumination and the duration of exposure. The photograph records their temporary convergence without digital reconstruction.
• CREATIVE RURALISM BY PROFESSOR JAVIER POYATOS SEBASTIÁN: , 2020 (publication). "Written by Javier Poyatos Sebastián, associate professor of the theory of architecture and the city at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, this academic text considers Renaciendo, shown in the ruined church of the former Carmelite convent in Budia. Poyatos describes the exhibition as the artist’s first in Spain, and notes that the lighting system and the crucifix were fabricated by hand from aluminium recycled in the village. He calls the project an example of creative ruralism and writes, in translation, that the exhibition “constitutes a hymn to a natural world that is disappearing”. The text connects the intervention to the town’s long standing wish to rehabilitate the convent building, and records that the works had been shown in London in 2019, at Dellasposa and at Canary Wharf Crossrail Place."
• CROWN OF THORNS, 2015 (film). Made in a remote studio near Yekaterinburg, the film documents a crown of thorns formed from solidified crude oil and sealed within an ossuary of river ice. The work brings two materials into direct opposition: crude oil, geological and enduring, held within ice that is temporary and subject to continual transformation. The Christian symbol remains visible but physically suspended, enclosed within a structure whose transparency, refraction and eventual disappearance are determined by temperature and time.
• CULTURE 24 RUSSIA: DARK VAT, 2019 (publication). Published during Dark Vat, this illustrated feature documents the artist residency established within a former Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. The article records the transformation of 600 square metres of industrial space into a working environment shared with a group of young Siberian artists. It describes an open studio model in which participants worked across photography, painting, sculpture, moving image and installation, with the residency developing through direct exchange between individual practices. The feature culminates with the resulting public exhibition, presenting work produced during the residency throughout the former factory. Its photographs provide a contemporary visual record of the studios, participants and large-scale installations occupying the industrial architecture. As a publication produced while Dark Vat was active, the feature provides an independent record of the residency as both a working artistic environment and a public cultural programme.
• DARK MATTER FILM ONE, 2022 (film). Dark Matter I explores the idea of a black hole as both scientific reality and metaphor, using analogue optical phenomena to create the illusion of light collapsing into an unseen centre. Rather than illustrating astronomy, the film examines the threshold where light, gravity and perception begin to dissolve into one another, transforming physical experiment into moving image. Created entirely in-camera through analogue photographic processes, the work extends the investigation into light and material behaviour beyond the still image, allowing the event itself to unfold through time. Dark Matter I 4K film, duration 4 min Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Editor: Oleg Deetz Original soundtrack: Sub-octane
• DARK MATTER FILM TWO, 2024 (film). Dark Matter II continues a decade long investigation into gravitational collapse and the behaviour of light waves through analogue photographic experimentation. Expanding the ideas introduced in Dark Matter Film I (2022), shifting optical fields, reflections and physical interactions create the impression of matter disappearing beyond perception, where the boundary between scientific observation and abstraction begins to dissolve. Conceived as a moving extension of the photographic research, the work records real physical events rather than digital simulations, allowing the dynamics of light and material to unfold through time. Dark Matter II 4K film, duration 9 min 53 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Editor: Oleg Deetz Original soundtrack: Sub-octane
• DARK VAT - DOCUMENTARY FILM I, 2019 (film). Established in 2019 within a disused Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Dark Vat transformed the former industrial complex into an international artist residency and cultural programme. Filmed from within the residency by participating artist Elizaveta Stefankina, this short documentary records the project as it unfolded: artists working within the surviving industrial spaces, installations taking form from materials found on site, and exchanges between artists, writers, dancers and other participants. The residency culminated in a major public exhibition and attracted extensive regional and national media attention. Bringing twelve distinct artistic practices together within a building closely connected to the photographic history of Krasnoyarsk, Dark Vat became a significant cultural event for the city and contributed to a wider discussion around contemporary artistic practice in the region. The film preserves a contemporary record of that moment, documenting both the physical character of the former factory and the temporary artistic community that occupied and transformed it. Dark Vat, Artist Residency 4K film, 1 min 32 sec Director of Photography: Elizaveta Stefankina Original soundtrack: Ryuichi Sakamoto
• DARK VAT BOOK, 2019 (publication). Published in June 2019 as a limited edition of 100, Dark Vat documents the artists and works brought together through the residency established within the former Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Rather than functioning as a conventional exhibition catalogue, the publication forms a visual record of the residency itself. Across photography, painting, drawing and other experimental practices, it preserves the diversity of work produced within a temporary artistic community formed around a site with its own history of photographic production. The publication brings together work by Alexander James Hamilton and eleven participating Russian artists, including Oleg Deetz, Marina Leonteva, Andrey Shmaly, Alexey Akimov, Kseniya Galkina, Inna Shestakova and Alexey Shidlovsky. Selected and published in Krasnoyarsk by Magical Art from Red Ravine, the book takes its title directly from the Dark Vat residency exhibition curated by the artist.
• DARK VAT - DOCUMENTARY FILM II, 2019 (film). Dark Vat transformed a disused Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk into a temporary centre for contemporary artistic production, bringing together twelve artists alongside writers, dancers, philosophers and other participants. This extended documentary, filmed from within the 2019 residency by participating artist Elizaveta Stefankina, follows the daily life of the project across the former factory: the development of individual works, the occupation and adaptation of its industrial spaces, workshops, performances and the exchanges that developed between participants during the residency. Much of the work was produced in direct response to the building itself. Materials and remnants found within the abandoned photographic factory entered new installations, while its architecture and history became part of the conditions under which the artists worked. The programme culminated in a major public exhibition and received extensive regional and national media coverage. Dark Vat became a significant event within the cultural landscape of Krasnoyarsk, establishing a temporary centre of artistic activity within a site previously associated with the region’s photographic industry. The film remains an extended first-hand record of the residency, its participants and the extraordinary industrial environment in which the project took place. Dark Vat, Artist Residency 4K film, 7 min 48 sec Director of Photography: Elizaveta Stefankina Original soundtrack
• DARK VAT II, 2019 (residency). Six resident artists from the Dark Vat residency were invited to continue their practice at the mountain studio. As part of the residency, each artist was asked to commit two days per week to voluntary restoration work. In this instance, the project focused on the Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Peral, a historic hilltop chapel where the resident artists helped restore several rooms, ceilings and the original portico. Rather than treating the building solely as an architectural restoration, the residency reactivated it as a place of culture, public participation and environmental awareness. The experience reinforced an approach in which artistic practice extends beyond image-making to include the restoration, activation and temporary occupation of culturally significant places. The project was later examined by Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián within the context of the exhibition Renaciendo (Re-born) and Creative Ruralism, recognising it as a model of cultural regeneration through artistic practice. Writing in response to the project, Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián observed: "Alexander James Hamilton is a rare transversal artist, committed to society and nature, Renaissance in attitude."
• DEATH OF THE DREAM, 2017 (exhibition). Death of the Dream brought together two major bodies of work: Death of the Dream of Democracy and the first public presentation of Transparency of a Dream Illuminated. The exhibition marked a decisive point in the practice. Political commentary, Vanitas, large-format analogue photography and illuminated photographic works were brought together within a framework increasingly concerned with singularity, material provenance and the physical construction of the image. By this stage, the decision to abandon editions and produce only unique photographic works had become central to the practice, challenging photography's reproducibility through the status of the individual object. Across both series, every visible element existed physically before the camera. Flowers, butterflies, fabrics and constructed forms were grown, fabricated and assembled in the studio, then documented in camera on analogue film without any form of reliance on digital post production. In Transparency of a Dream Illuminated, light became not simply a means of illumination but part of the material structure of the finished work. Death of the Dream therefore brought together several strands that would continue to shape the later practice: the unique photographic object, the studio as a research facility into system building, and the photograph as the final material trace of a much larger physical process.
• DEFLUXIO, 1996 (installation). Developed in late 1996, Defluxio was a series of site-specific interventions installed throughout the Los Angeles floodwater network, including sections of the 51-mile Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek and the San Gabriel River. Working within these engineered waterways, temporary diversion plinths were constructed entirely by hand from locally found materials. Positioned within the natural flow of the river, each intervention redirected the current to generate vortices, eddies and whirlpools, revealing the hidden behaviour of moving water within an otherwise controlled urban landscape. Existing only through the forces acting upon them, the installations formed a dialogue between human intervention and natural process, foreshadowing an enduring interest in water as an active medium rather than simply a subject.
• DESIGNING A CIRCULAR FUTURE ALCARRIA, 2024 (research). Hosted within a restored rural ermita in Budia during the summer of 2024, this international artist residency and workshop series explored how design, digital fabrication and circular material systems might address environmental challenges in remote communities. The programme brought together four resident artists and university participants, combining hands-on experimentation with 3D scanning, modelling and additive manufacturing. The residency occupied a building that the artists themselves helped renovate over the course of the summer, establishing both the physical setting and collaborative ethos for the programme. Many of the ideas first tested here would later inform the development of Makers Place Recycling Studio in the Maldives, while also laying the foundations for the wider cultural regeneration project that later became Renaciendo re-opening the last Carmelita Convent still standing in Spain that had remained closed to the public for over 170 years.
• DESIGNING A CIRCULAR FUTURE GOLD COAST, 2018 (research). Developed as a university research programme on Australia's Gold Coast, Designing A Circular Future explored how design, digital fabrication and material recovery could converge within practical circular economy systems. Combining 3D scanning, modelling and additive manufacturing with hands on experimentation, the programme investigated how end of life materials might be reintroduced into new forms of production. The research established many of the principles that would later underpin Makers Place, where these ideas evolved from academic investigation into a permanent community recycling studio in the Maldives.
• DESIGNING A CIRCULAR FUTURE MALDIVES, 2017 (research). Building on the research established in Australia, Designing A Circular Future entered its practical phase in the Maldives through a series of collaborative workshops, public demonstrations and prototype development. Bringing together designers, educators, government agencies and local communities, the programme explored circular material systems for remote island environments, transforming discarded plastics and aluminium into new products through digital design and distributed manufacturing. These workshops became the foundation of Makers Place, where research evolved into a permanent community recycling studio and long-term environmental initiative.
• DESIGNING A CIRCULAR FUTURE SRI LANKA, 2019 (research). Developed as part of the wider Designing A Circular Future research programme, the Sri Lankan workshops explored circular design strategies for island environments where material resources are limited and waste presents significant environmental challenges. Bringing together designers, educators and local partners, the programme investigated how digital fabrication, material recovery and community engagement could be combined to create practical, locally appropriate recycling systems. These collaborative exchanges further refined the research that would ultimately inform the establishment of Makers Place in the Maldives and the studio's continuing commitment to circular design.
• DEUTSCHE WELL NEWSCAST, 2014 (film). Broadcast by Deutsche Welle, Waterproof enters the studio during the construction and photographing of a submerged vanitas work, following a process in which sculpture, painting and photography converge within water. The film documents the preparation of a 4,000 litre tank, the purification of the water and the physical positioning of a skull and crown of thorns before exposure. Colour, reflection and optical distortion are created within the tank and recorded directly onto light sensitive film, without digital post production. The broadcast describes a process developed over three decades in which editing takes place before the camera and each exposure records an unrepeatable conjunction of object, light and fluid dynamics. Through the recurring language of vanitas, the film connects skulls, flowers and butterflies with mortality, renewal and the environmental fragility of water. Drawing upon the symbolism of Dutch Baroque painting, these historical forms are repositioned against contemporary concerns surrounding diminishing water resources, transforming an image traditionally concerned with the transience of individual life into a reflection on collective ecological consequence.
• DRINK LESS, 2021 (exhibition). Drink Less is a series of hand-cast aluminium sculptures produced at Makers Place in the Maldives from discarded single-use aluminium recovered from the islands. The works were conceived as a humorous poke at the major drinks manufacturers whose branded cans and bottles formed a persistent part of the waste stream. Rather than shipping the recovered aluminium off-island for industrial recycling, it was processed locally and returned to permanent physical form. Familiar disposable objects were recast as unexpectedly substantial sculptures. The works extended the intent by presenting crushed cans weighing over 1 kg each, The Naive Twins, a pair of discarded water bottles, and other altered bottle forms, turning the visual language of mass-produced packaging back upon itself. Produced from original maquettes and individually cast in sand, the sculptures formed part of the full-circle material process developed at Makers Place, transforming waste recovered within the islands into objects intended to leave the Maldives with the tourists who had created it, rather than the raw material being shipped overseas for onward processing or, worse, ending up on Thilafushi, the rubbish island.
• EMPIRICAL RESEARCH & EVIDENCE, 2022 (film). Empirical Research & Evidence documents a series of large-scale field experiments undertaken during the Siberian expeditions, where crude oil, fresh water and light were brought together under the extreme conditions of the winter forest. Constructed ice ossuaries were created using tonnes of frozen river water, allowing the material behaviour of oil, ice and transmitted light to be observed, recorded and photographed over time. Filmed on location throughout the expedition, the work records the physical processes behind the photographs, revealing the environmental conditions, temporary structures and experimental methodology that underpin the Oil + Water series. Empirical Research & Evidence 4K film, 4 min 01 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Editor: Oleg Deetz Original soundtrack: Sub-octane
• FLESH & FOLIAGE, 1996 (exhibition). Presented at Loft 56, New York, in 1996, Flesh & Foliage was an early solo exhibition bringing together photographs of the human figure within dense arrangements of foliage and natural forms. The works explored the visual relationship between body and environment, using the contrast of skin, vegetation, texture and organic form to construct images in which the figure appears embedded within, rather than simply posed against, the surrounding landscape.
• FLIGHT, 2006 (exhibition). Presented at the Boiler House, Shanghai, in 2006, *Flight* brought together a body of photographs examining birds in motion and the changing conditions through which they move. The works ranged from close studies of wings and feather structures in motion to birds crossing open water and built landscapes. They record the physical mechanics of flight with remarkable precision, while allowing speed, distance and movement to dissolve the subject almost into abstraction. Across the exhibition, flight appears alternately as freedom, navigation and constraint, observed through carefully planned encounters that enabled a non-invasive engagement between the moving bird, its surroundings and the camera.
• FOUR MAGAZINE: THE WATERY WORLD, 2015 (publication). The Watery World of Alexander James visits the London studio during preparations for a collaborative artist residency bringing together artists, composers, writers, poets and filmmakers. The article describes the black-water studio and the physical process used to construct the photographs. Objects were fixed within highly filtered water, lit and documented using 10×8 analogue plates, while deviations in the water surface were created manually to control its resonance. “James insists that he is not photographing the object, he is photographing the water.” The article also records that the resulting transparencies were produced without Photoshop and that every print was unique.
• FROM WATER TO THE UNIVERSE, 2023 (publication). Published in Seisma Magazine, Paul Carey-Kent’s essay examines Cymatic Water + Light through the relationship between photographic experiment, resonance physics and contemporary astrophysics. Carey-Kent considers Hamilton’s use of cymatic phenomena as a means of making otherwise invisible physical behaviour perceptible. Within the works, water is subjected to controlled frequencies that produce interacting wave structures, including standing and Faraday waves. Light passing across these continuously changing surfaces transforms the water itself into an optical instrument, determining the structures recorded by the analogue exposure. The essay extends this enquiry beyond the studio by considering the formal and physical correspondences between waves generated in liquid and gravitational waves moving through space-time. Rather than treating the comparison simply as visual analogy, Carey-Kent situates the work within a wider investigation of how phenomena beyond ordinary human perception might become available through experiment, observation and image-making. The essay also connects the cymatic works to earlier bodies including Rosae, Dissolved Sadness and All Icons Are False, identifying water not simply as recurring subject matter but as an active medium through which the image is physically produced. The original publication can be found at.. https://seismamag.com/visual-fine-art/alexander-james-hamilton
• FUSION: A CONVERSATION WITH EMMA COCCIOLI, 2021 (publication). A substantial illustrated conversation with author Emma Coccioli examining Fusion, a body of work developed between 2010 and 2021. The discussion moves between environmental degradation, mortality, cosmology, art history and the physical processes through which the photographs were constructed. The conversation traces Fusion to the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 and places the series within a longer engagement with water, sustainability and ecocide. It extends across earlier underwater installations, Visions from the Shoreline and the establishment of Makers Place in the Maldives, connecting photographic practice with direct environmental intervention. Coccioli's questions locate the work within a wider cultural field encompassing Caravaggio, Nietzsche, Munch, Dante, cosmology and the recurring relationship between creation and destruction. In response, the photographic process is described as fundamentally physical: forms are constructed and transformed within water, recorded directly in camera and left without digital post-production. The conversation also contains an early articulation of an idea that would become increasingly central to the practice: the photograph as the surviving record of a temporary physical event. Once an analogue plate has been exposed and developed, the constructed scene is destroyed, leaving the photograph as its only material evidence. Across the discussion, the studio emerges as a place of continual material transformation, where photography, water, light, sculpture, natural processes and experimentation overlap rather than operate as separate disciplines.
• GOYA REBORN IN WATER, 2025 (exhibition). Presented from 5 July to 30 September 2025 at the Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja, Brihuega, *Goya Reborn in Water* brought Alexander James Hamilton’s photographic works into the stone vaults of a fortress with origins in the 10th and 11th centuries. The exhibition presented religious portraits constructed and photographed underwater, in a setting where the works encountered the architecture and religious history of the building. Visitors approached the castle through its cemetery, an entrance the artist incorporated into the exhibition’s sequence. Following *Renaciendo*, presented in 2024 at the former Carmelite convent in Budia, the exhibition continued Hamilton’s practice of bringing photographic works into historic buildings. The artist described the series as reprising the rigour of early nineteenth-century print workshops, in dialogue with the etchings of Francisco de Goya. An exhibition catalogue was published in English and Spanish.
• HAMILTON IN BUDIA — JESÚS DE ANDRÉS, NUEVA ALCARRIA, 2020 (publication). Published in Nueva Alcarria in 2020, Jesús de Andrés’ Hamilton in Budia provides an independent contemporary account of Renaciendo and the transformation of the former Carmelite convent into a temporary cultural space. De Andrés describes the exhibition as among the most original and significant presented in Guadalajara, locating its environmental argument within the physical architecture of the ruined Baroque church. The article records analogue photographs on aluminium, sculptural works made from recycled material and marine debris, and the months of physical work required to clear the building, remove tonnes of rubble, establish a new floor and construct a lighting system specifically for the site. Importantly, the article considers the intervention beyond the duration of the exhibition. De Andrés argues that the newly established cultural space should be maintained for future use and records that substantial elements of the work were intended to remain with the local community. As a contemporary critical account, the publication documents the point at which exhibition-making, environmental practice and the reactivation of abandoned architecture became increasingly interconnected.
• HOLOGRAPHIC FILM ONE, 2019 (film). Holographic Film One was conceived as a site-specific moving image installation for the Dark Vat artist residency in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Projected across a vast blackwater reflection pool constructed within the abandoned photographic paper factory, the work transformed the industrial architecture into an immersive field of liquid light and reflections. Developed through a collaboration between analogue photographic research and digital animation, the projection explored ideas of dimensional space, optical perception and the instability of the image, extending the residency's wider investigation into photography beyond the still frame and into architectural space. Holographic Projection I 4K film, duration 7 min 48 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Digital Lead Artist: Inna Shestakova Digital Artist: Alexey Shidlovsky Original soundtrack: Sub-octane
• HOLOGRAPHIC FILM TWO, 2019 (film). Holographic Film Two continues the series of site-specific moving image installations developed during the Dark Vat artist residency in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Created for the abandoned Soviet photographic paper factory, the work used large-scale projection across a blackwater reflection pool to dissolve the boundaries between architecture, light and image. The projected forms were conceived specifically for the industrial space, allowing the building itself to become part of the optical event. Combining analogue photographic research with digital animation, the installation transformed a place once dedicated to the manufacture of photographic materials into an environment where photography expanded into time, reflection and physical space. Holographic Projection II Dark Vat artist residency 4K film, duration 7 min 14 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Digital Lead Artist: Inna Shestakova Digital Artist: Alexey Shidlovsky Original soundtrack: Sub-octane
• HOLOGRAPHIC FILM THREE, 2019 (film). Holographic Film Three concludes the projection series developed during the Dark Vat artist residency in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Building upon the earlier installations, the work reduces image, reflection and movement to their essential components, allowing projected light and black water to merge into a single perceptual field. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the film invites prolonged observation, where shifting reflections, symmetry and optical interference continually transform the relationship between surface, depth and space. The resulting work exists between installation, moving image and photographic experiment, extending the language of analogue observation through digital collaboration. Holographic Projection III 4K film, duration 1 min 58 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Digital Lead Artist: Inna Shestakova Digital Artist: Alexey Shidlovsky Generative soundtrack
• HOUSE OF THE NOBLEMAN, 2010-2011 (exhibition). Presented as part of *The Return at House of the Nobleman*, Regent’s Park, London, the exhibition brought together an international group of contemporary artists working across sculpture, photography, installation and architecture. Works from *Swarm* were selected for the exhibition, presenting photographic studies of butterflies in which individual specimens accumulate into dense fields of colour, movement and repeated form. The works formed part of an ongoing series developed through the observation and construction of large gatherings of butterflies.
• ICONOCLASTS, 2011 (exhibition). Presented at *Iconoclasts* at Lloyds Club, London, from 2 December 2011 to 23 February 2012, the exhibition was curated by Katie Heller in association with Pertwee, Anderson & Gold and Edel Assanti. The exhibition brought together contemporary British artists whose work engaged with historical precedents, either assimilating or reacting against them. Works from *Swarm* and *Vanitas* were shown within this context, including *Isis Bound*, which was used as the principal image for the exhibition. Held within the Grade II listed Lloyds Club in Crutched Friars, built in 1616, *Iconoclasts* also marked the first occasion on which the private club opened its doors to the public.
• RTV DOCUMENTARY, 2014 (film). Immersed in Moscow was filmed over five months, this 40-minute observational documentary follows the establishment of the Red October studio and the creation of Rastvorennaya Pechal in Moscow. Beginning before the work itself could properly commence, the film records the transformation of a disused industrial space into a functioning studio and continues through production, interruption, installation and the opening of the exhibition. Working without a conventional documentary structure, the camera remains inside the process as large water systems are constructed and maintained, models cast, garments and sets fabricated, analogue films exposed and processed, and individual works repeatedly adapted in response to material and practical constraints. Visa difficulties, financial pressure, technical failures and the physical demands of the studio remain visible rather than being removed from the account. The resulting documentary preserves the uncertainty and improvisation through which the work developed. Throughout the film, photography is positioned as the final stage of a substantially larger physical undertaking. Preparation, material authenticity and the refusal of post production determine the working method, while the studio itself operates as laboratory, workshop, darkroom and living environment. The documentary culminates in the construction of Rastvorennaya Pechal at Triumph Gallery, including a thirty square metre black water installation conceived as the physical centre of the exhibition. “Take a studio, take a function, take an idea, take a process, and take an actual set of values to that process, and live by them, no matter what.” Alexander James, RTV documentary, Moscow, 2014
• INTERSECTION, 2013 (exhibition). Intersection was a large-scale solo exhibition bringing together works from Vanitas, Swarm and Glass, three bodies of work developed through investigations of water, material, light and the constructed photographic image. At the centre of the exhibition was an extended investigation of the Vanitas tradition. Ephemeral sculptural arrangements assembled from flowers, organic material, found objects and fabricated elements were constructed within tanks of highly purified water and photographed in camera. Water operated simultaneously as material, optical medium and agent of transformation, altering the passage of light between the constructed subject and the photographic lens. The physical constructions were subsequently dismantled, leaving the photographic transparency as the material record of the event. The architecture of the exhibition was itself constructed as part of the work. The raw concrete, steel and glass interior of The Studio Building was blacked out and transformed through a purpose-built lighting system, with the photographs illuminated against an otherwise darkened space. The installation extended the principles governing the photographs into the exhibition environment, treating light, spatial conditions and the viewer's perception as components of a single constructed system. “Walking in to any show by English artist Alexander James is like being in a multi storey car park lit by Dan Flavin.” Anna McNay, writer and art critic Studio International Magazine.
• INTERSECTION — AESTHETICA, 2012 (publication). Coinciding with the exhibition Intersection, this article provides an early independent account of the physical methodology underlying the work. Describing how sculptural installations constructed from natural objects and handmade elements within tanks of highly purified water, identifying the interaction between object, light, lens and water as responsible for the resulting painterly image. Describing the approach as one of “obsessive photographic purity”. Writing about Vanitas, the article identifies water not simply as the environment in which the works were made, but as an element capable of changing both their visual appearance and meaning. Grace, first presented publicly at Intersection, is described as bringing together the processes developed to photograph organic materials while simultaneously addressing life and its transience. A contemporary record of a practice already being understood through the relationship between physical construction, water, light and in-camera photographic process, principles that would become increasingly explicit in the work that followed.
• INTERSECTION FILM I, 2012 (film). The first of three films made within the London rooftop studio during the preparation of *Intersection*, documenting the physical environment and working processes from which the exhibition developed. Large dark tanks of water formed the centre of the studio. Sculptural arrangements were constructed within and around them, illuminated under controlled conditions and photographed through the water, bringing photography, sculpture and painting with light into a single working process. Water can be seen being used as an optical lens. This was the first time a film crew had been allowed into the studio during production. Film I records this environment while the work was being made: the tanks, constructed sets, lighting and physical interventions that existed before the final photographs. It provides a contemporary moving-image record of *Intersection* at the point of production, preserving processes and temporary constructions that would otherwise survive only through the resulting photographs.
• ISLAND CLEANUP - LA MADDALENA, 2025 (project). Commissioned to create a body of work from materials recovered along the beaches of La Maddalena, Sardinia. Travelling by sea kayak, the entire island was circumnavigated while collecting discarded plastics and aluminium washed ashore, transforming environmental recovery into the starting point for a new body of work. The project combined expedition, direct environmental action and studio practice, demonstrating how discarded materials can be recontextualised through photography and sculpture. Many of the principles explored during this commission would later re-emerge within the studio's wider research into circular design and material recovery.
• KULTURA 24 - NATIONAL NEWSCAST, 2019 (film). Kultura 24 documented the Dark Vat artist residency for national Russian television, following the transformation of a disused Soviet photographic paper factory into an international centre for contemporary art, research and cultural exchange. Filmed on location throughout the residency, the broadcast combined interviews, exhibition footage and behind-the-scenes documentation, providing an independent record of the programme and its wider cultural impact. It remains one of the principal contemporary documents of the residency and its contribution to the cultural regeneration of Krasnoyarsk. Kultura 24 – National Newscast National television broadcast, Russia, 2019 Duration: 3 min 57 sec Interview featuring Alexander James Hamilton
• LIFE, DEATH AND VANITY — NEW STATESMAN, 2019 (publication). Published by The New Statesman during the exhibition Intersection, Charlotte Simmonds' essay places the work within the historical tradition of still life and Vanitas while examining the physical processes through which the photographs are made. Simmonds describes sculptural compositions constructed in the studio, submerged within black, velvet-lined tanks of highly purified water and photographed only after the relationship between material, light and movement has been established. The process is characterised as both intricate and scientific, with water acting as an optical medium through which the distinction between sculpture, photography and painting becomes deliberately unstable. The article also records an early commitment to “in camera purity”, rejecting digital post-production in favour of analogue film and what the artist described as “unrepeatable moments in time.” The temporary assemblages were frequently destroyed after exposure, leaving the photograph as the sole surviving record of a physical construction and conditions that could never be repeated.
• LIQUID MECHANICS, 1999 (instalation). A series of eighteen site-specific installations created to map the endangered chalk streams of Kent, England, one of the world's rarest freshwater ecosystems. Developed through direct engagement with the landscape, the project transformed hydrological data and fragile river systems into physical interventions, drawing attention to waterways increasingly threatened by extraction, pollution and environmental change. Working at the intersection of environmental research, sculpture and photography, Liquid Mechanics marked an early investigation into water as both subject and physical medium. The project established many of the ecological concerns that would continue to develop throughout later expeditions, environmental commissions and the studio's wider exploration of water as a material capable of recording invisible natural processes.
• MAINICHI SHIMBUN — TAXI / ALEXANDER JAMES, 2010 (project). Between 1996 and 2010 Alexander James Hamilton travelled to Tokyo thirteen times to photograph the illuminated roof lights of the city's taxis — 58,000 cabs run by more than a thousand companies, no two signs alike. "The roof lights on Tokyo taxis are fascinating. Each one has its own personality. They're like sweets." The method was fixed and unforgiving: one exposure per subject. No second frame, no cropping, no post-production. On one occasion he stood at the roadside in Roppongi for six hours before dawn in falling snow, waiting; a café worker took pity on him and brought out a coffee. In March 2010, on his thirteenth visit, he finally caught a rare frog-shaped sign he had been pursuing for ten years, and jumped in the street. The principle behind the series was to pursue the surprises hidden inside everyday life — the things most people never stop to notice. He was drawn to the intense energy of taxis hurrying through the city with their passengers, the lit signs on their roofs intersecting with the reflections of the streets around them. The work was shown as Tokyo Green at the Conningsby Gallery, London in April 2010, as Taxi at ANN330 Gallery, Los Angeles that May, and published as Tokyo Taxi by Merrell in 2012. The account above comes from a full-page profile in the Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan's national dailies, written and photographed by Toshihiko Kasahara, the paper's European Bureau Chief. Its interest now is not the series but the sentence the reporter set down as plain fact: he releases the shutter only once for each subject. Fifteen years before The Photograph As Event, a Japanese national newspaper had already recorded the discipline the manuscript would come to argue for. read the original clipping… Mainichi Shimbun (毎日新聞), 「ひと」 column, 2010 "A British photographer who photographs taxi roof lights" — text and photograph by Toshihiko Kasahara Taxi Times -article https://taxi-times.com/tokyos-vibrant-adorable-taxi-signs-are-disappearing/
• MAKERS PLACE: LUXE MAGAZINE, 2022 (publication). Published in the January/February 2022 issue of LUXE, this feature documents Makers Place shortly after the recycling studio became operational at Soneva Fushi in the Maldives. Described as a fully carbon-neutral island workshop, the facility was established to transform discarded plastic and aluminium into artworks, practical objects and building materials. Within its first three days of operation, LUXE reported that 15,000 aluminium cans had been processed, providing an early measure of the project as functioning recycling infrastructure. The project was independently designed, funded and built as a studio initiative, establishing a working model for subsequent sustainable community projects and artist residencies. The article also records its connection with neighbouring island communities through Soneva Namoona and wider efforts to address marine plastic and waste management across Baa Atoll.
• MAKERS PLACE RECYCLING STUDIO, 2021 (project). Makers Place is a sustainable single use plastic and aluminium recycling studio, designed, funded and built from the ground up by Alexander James Hamilton. Developed for a remote island environment, the facility transforms locally recovered waste into new products through practical circular manufacturing, creating a permanent resource for education, environmental stewardship and community resilience. The first remote island facility of its kind, Makers Place remains fully operational today and provides the framework for future community-led recycling initiatives. Makers Place II is currently in development with local government support for land and staffing, with construction scheduled to commence once funding has been secured.
• MEMORY, TRAUMA and CONTEMPORARY ART, 2012 (publication). Writing in Contemporary Art: Memory, Trauma and Commemoration in May 2012, Olivia Wright reviewed A Beautiful Announcement of Death at Pertwee, Anderson & Gold, London. Wright describes scenes constructed entirely within dark water tanks, with water and light manipulated around meticulously prepared subjects and captured on medium-format film with “no post-production of any kind”. She places the resulting works between sixteenth-century painting, sculpture and photography. Writing about the installation, she describes the darkened gallery as a crypt-like space centred upon Ophelia, surrounded by flowers and butterflies carrying associations of death and mourning. Wright also notes that ripples of water remain visible within the photographs, revealing something of the physical installations from which the images were made.
• MOSCOW 24 NATIONAL NEWSCAST, 2014 (film). Broadcast by Moscow 24 to coincide with the vernissage of Rastvorennaya Pechal at Triumph Gallery, this report documents the physical processes behind a body of work produced entirely in Russia following the establishment of a studio at Red October, Moscow. The film documents the constructed conditions through which the works were created. A vast, highly purified water tank is the setting with controlled lighting and carefully prepared materials formed an environment in which compositions developed over four months of studio isolation. Roses were submerged until their colour and physical structure changed, while butterflies were bred specifically for individual works. The resulting colour, distortion and optical effects occurred physically within these conditions and were recorded in camera without any form of post production. Water emerges not simply as the setting for the photographs, but as their principal material. The broadcast connects this sustained experimentation with a wider concern for water as a finite resource, documenting an important stage in the development of a practice in which the conditions surrounding the photograph increasingly become part of the work itself.
• HÅ GAMLE MUSEUM - NATRE MORTE, 2015 (exhibition). Natre Morte explored the continuing relevance of one of art history's most enduring genres through the work of leading contemporary artists. Bringing together a broad range of contemporary interpretations, the exhibition examined how the visual language of Vanitas and Nature Morte continues to evolve while remaining rooted in centuries of painterly tradition. The exhibition positioned these works within an ongoing dialogue between historical symbolism and contemporary photographic practice. An international travelling exhibition working in collaboration with Thames & Hudson.
• NO LOGO, 2010 (exhibition). A body of work examining the relationship between luxury branding, consumer culture and the enduring symbolism of the red rose. These images are not intended as an homage to the brands they depict, but instead act as a commentary on a society increasingly shaped by branding, aspiration and celebrity. Produced entirely in camera, each work was photographed beneath the surface of water, allowing the subtle distortions created by the water's own wave energy to become an integral part of the image. Presented without cropping or digital post-production, the series established an early commitment to process, optical integrity and the use of water as both medium and subject. What first appeared as a critique of consumer culture also marked the beginning of a photographic language that would continue to evolve over the following two decades, culminating in a practice where light, water and physical process became inseparable from the final work.
• VISIONS FROM THE SHORELINE, 1985 - 2017 (expedition). Created during extended periods of remote expedition, living and travelling alone throughout the Maldivian atolls, *Visions from the Shoreline* began in the late 1980s. Travelling by sea kayak in a vessel hand built specifically for the journey, the expeditions first followed the atolls from north to south before, in 2017, retracing the entire route in reverse, south to north. Working from the water and while free-diving, the journeys recorded the islands from the shoreline and beneath the surface: coral reefs, shallow lagoons, changing light and the material arriving on otherwise remote shores. Photography, letters, diary notations and collected material formed a continuing record of the encounters. Returning to the same route decades later revealed an environment substantially altered by tourism, development and the accumulation of foreign waste. Material recovered from the reefs and shorelines during the 2017 expedition subsequently became the physical source of the camera-less PhotoGrams and environmental works presented as *Visions from the Shoreline*.
• EMPIRICAL RESEARCH & EVIDENCE, 2014 - 2023 (expedition). *Empirical Research & Evidence* developed through a series of field expeditions deep into the forests of Siberia, working with crude oil and frozen river water within the landscape from which both materials originated. The project examined the environmental legacy of industrial oil extraction within one of the world’s largest crude oil reserves, bringing oil together with river water to form an unlikely alliance. Large blocks of river ice, some weighing several tonnes, were constructed and worked at temperatures approaching −50°C. Crude oil was introduced into and across the frozen structures, producing unpredictable physical reactions as the materials met, separated, fractured and changed state. Gas pockets formed and became trapped within the ice, producing internal heat and violent ruptures during the process. Developed through repeated field expeditions, the project combined site-specific sculptural installations with large-format analogue photography. The resulting structures were photographed under the available conditions of the landscape, extending the photographic process beyond the studio and into the physical, climatic and industrial conditions that gave rise to the work.
• OPHELIA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, 2014 (publication). Laissez Faire · Interview by Britt Pflüger · 2014 Published following the Moscow production of Rastvorennaya Pechal, Britt Pflüger's extended interview examines the working methods developed within the Red October studio and their relationship to painting, sculpture, analogue photography and water. The interview provides a particularly detailed contemporary account of the physical construction of the photographs. Water is described as an active optical material, with liquid mechanics and changes in surface tension used to redirect light across submerged subjects. Black is treated as the underlying canvas, while the resulting event is recorded directly onto 10 × 8 inch film. The conversation also records the decision to present the original transparency as the final artwork, rather than a photographic print, and explicitly rejects post-production and editions. The photographic object is described as the record of a single moment produced through controlled combinations of material, chemistry, temperature and time. Of particular relevance to the later development of the practice is a description of these photographs as “carefully constructed moments”, followed by an account of the exposed film as emerging from a particular combination of “time, event and process.” Read retrospectively, the interview provides an early published record of ideas that would later become more formally articulated around the photograph as the material consequence of a constructed event.
• PERCEIVING REALITY THE ENTHALPY OF EXISTENCE, 2025 (publication). Published by Interalia Magazine, this extended essay examines Oil + Water (2013–2016) and Empirical Research & Evidence (2021–2023) as two phases of a continuing investigation into matter, energy and environmental change. The first body of work was produced during successive winter expeditions to Siberia, where river water and crude oil were subjected to extreme cold within large constructed forms. The resulting analogue photographs record phase transition as an image-making mechanism: pressure, freezing, fracture and the optical separation of immiscible materials determine what appears on the film. Returning to the same river locations years later, the experiment could no longer be repeated under the altered environmental conditions. The physical reactions that had generated the earlier works diminished or failed altogether. Empirical Research & Evidence consequently records absence as evidence, establishing the two bodies of work as a comparative study in which environmental conditions determine not simply the subject of the photograph, but whether the image can exist at all. The essay develops this relationship through questions of entropy, perception and observation, proposing the analogue photograph as the material residue of an event rather than its representation. The original publication can be found at.. https://www.interaliamag.org/audiovisual/alexander-james-hamilton-perceivireality-the-enthalpy-of-existence/
• PHILISTINE INTERVIEW, 2015 (publication). interview by Dominic Perry photography by Harry Mitchell A long-form interview conducted between New York and the Red October studio in Moscow, examining artistic process, material authorship, failure, isolation and the physical conditions under which the work was being made. The issue's editors introduced the feature as Alexander James' love affair with Russia. The conversation records an uncompromising period of practice in Moscow, including the occupation of an unheated studio through winter and an insistence on direct involvement with the materials and processes from which the work emerged. It also contains an early published account of experiments using vibration to produce specific frequencies and wave patterns in water, anticipating the sustained investigation of water, light and physical phenomena that would develop through later bodies of work.
• PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST, 2015 (residency). Written by resident artist Elouise Stephens during the 2015 Artist Residency, Portrait of an Artist provides a contemporary account of the physical processes underlying the photographic practice, moving between the London studio and bodies of work including Vanitas, A Beautiful Announcement of Death, Rastvorennaya Pechal and Oil + Water. Stephens describes a working environment in which subjects were constructed beneath black water and light manipulated across the surface before being recorded directly onto large-format analogue film. The account emphasises the physical preparation preceding exposure and the deliberate rejection of post-production as a means of constructing the image after the event. Discussing the role of water within this process, the text records an early formulation of the tension between control and indeterminacy: “There’s a set object, a set camera and a set piece of film but with the introduction of water, nothing is set.” Stephens later describes the resulting patterns of light as being “born of a single and unrepeatable moment”, providing a contemporaneous record of ideas that would become increasingly explicit within the later practice: the photograph understood not simply as an image of an event, but as the material trace of conditions established for an event to occur.
• PRINCIPLES OF THE ARTIST RESIDENCY, 2019 (film). Produced as part of a nationally broadcast Rossiya 1 documentary in 2019, *The Principles Behind the Artist Residency Programme* records the thinking that shaped Dark Vat and the conditions established within the former Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk. The film sets out a model of residency that extends beyond the provision of studio space. Twelve artists were brought together within the abandoned industrial complex, alongside writers, dancers, philosophers and other participants, creating a temporary environment in which different disciplines could work in proximity, exchange ideas and respond directly to the building and its history. Exhaustive preparations were made to the space before the residency began. Hamilton described the process: “For me it was like having acid-flavoured ping-pong balls bouncing and colliding around the space. Ideas, objects and texts were placed under or inside one another: overlapping, folded, reconfigured and examined. The results were simply reinserted into the process, one unique artefact evolving into another. Time itself folded as each artwork’s journey was recorded and deconstructed.” Rather than prescribing a common artistic outcome, Dark Vat provided the conditions for individual practices to remain distinct while allowing unexpected collaborations and conversations to develop between them. The film preserves a contemporary statement of the principles behind the programme and of the collective enquiry that became central to the residency. *The Principles Behind the Artist Residency Programme* 4K film, 1 min 59 sec
• RASTVORENNAYA PECHAL, 2013 (exhibition). Presented at Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Rastvorennaya Pechal marked the beginning of a major new body of work following the relocation of the studio to Красный Октябрь (Red October). Uniquely, every work exhibited was conceived and produced entirely within Russia, making it the first exhibition of its kind by a British artist. Writing for the Royal Photographic Society, Professor Paul Hill observed that no previous artist had undertaken such a project, creating an exhibition for a Russian audience from within Russia itself rather than shipping completed works from abroad. Reflecting on the exhibition, art critic Grigory Revzin wrote: "Triumph Gallery in Moscow already has a reputation for introducing major British artists to a Russian audience. After Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, Hamilton became only the third British artist to receive a solo exhibition at the gallery, and the only one to have produced the works in Russia." Catalogue text written by Professor Andrei Tolstoy 1956–2016, Russian Academic, Professor of Arts & President AICA Russia who stated ‘ The photograph is the only existing record of a far bigger conceptual process that is produced through his complete dedication to a renaissance studio practice. ’
• RED OCTOBER STUDIO INTERVIEW, 2014 (film). Recorded during the first months of the Red October studio in Moscow, this informal interview was conducted by a fifteen-year-old student, with his classmates gathered silently in the studio. The resulting conversation is unusually direct and unguarded, moving between the construction of the new studio, the photographic process and the ideas informing the work at the time. The studio occupied part of the former Red October chocolate factory on Bolotny Island, an industrial complex originating in the nineteenth-century Einem confectionery works and later becoming one of Moscow's significant centres for contemporary culture. Establishing a working photographic studio within the former factory required the physical transformation of the space. Industrial machinery, contaminated soil and accumulated material were removed before large water tanks, filtration systems and the infrastructure required for working with highly purified water could be constructed. The conversation describes the studio as a collective working environment built around the physical demands of the photographic process. It discusses the construction of images before the camera, the use of water and natural light, analogue photography and the rejection of digital post-production. The interview also places the work within a longer art-historical lineage, explicitly connecting the practice to Flemish painting, Baroque and memento mori: “I believe my dialogue is deeply rooted in the Flemish movement. I am a Baroque memento mori artist.” Alexander James, Red October Studio interview, Moscow, 2014
• REHABILITATION - THE LAST CARMELITA CONVENT IN SPAIN, 2020 (restoration). Renaciendo was a large-scale exhibition of analogue photography, sculpture and lighting works installed throughout the ruins of the former Carmelite convent in Budia. The exhibition marked the reopening of the abandoned building after more than 170 years closed to the public. Developed from work made during extended periods in the Maldives and other marine environments, the exhibition examined the collision between natural beauty and the material consequences of industrialisation, plastic pollution and environmental degradation. Photographic works created through direct encounters between recovered materials, analogue film and natural light were presented alongside sculpture and lighting conceived specifically for the architecture. The convent was not treated simply as an exhibition venue. Its roofless nave, surviving Baroque structure and changing natural light became integral to the installation. The building was cleared and made accessible by the artist alone, while a new lighting system, fabricated from recycled beer cans specifically for the architecture, was installed throughout the space and subsequently donated for future cultural use. Writing about Renaciendo, Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián described the exhibition as bringing together natural and cultural heritage, with the memory of the former church becoming inseparable from the works installed within it. He positioned the intervention within the wider idea of “creative ruralism”, proposing the reactivation of neglected rural architecture as a site for renewed cultural life beyond the metropolitan centre.
• KONSTHALLEN BOHUSLÄN MUSEUM - REINVIGORATING THE STILL LIFE, 2016 (exhibition). Reinvigorating the Still Life was hosted at the Konsthallen Bohuslän Museum, Sweden. An exhibition that explored the continuing relevance of one of art history's most enduring genres through the work of leading contemporary artists. Bringing together a broad range of contemporary interpretations, the exhibition examined how the visual language of Vanitas and Nature Morte continues to evolve while remaining rooted in centuries of painterly tradition. The exhibition positioned these works within an ongoing dialogue between historical symbolism and contemporary photographic practice. An international travelling exhibition working in collaboration with Thames & Hudson.
• RED OCTOBER STUDIO MOSCOW, 2013 (project). Relocating the studio to Moscow by driving a four-tonne truck carrying the entire studio marked the beginning of one of the most significant periods of my photographic practice. Working between Britain and Russia at a time of increasing political distrust and escalating international tensions, the move enabled sustained research into Russia's rich cultural history and museum collections, culminating in the development of the new body of work Rastvorennaya Pechal, exhibited at Triumph Gallery, Moscow. The decision represented far more than a change of location. It was an immersion within a rapidly evolving cultural landscape that profoundly influenced both the scale and direction of the practice. The relocation was widely reported in the press, including a front and back cover feature in The Moscow Times, documenting the unusual moment in which a British photographic artist established a permanent studio in the Russian capital. Art critic Grigory Revzin observed: " ...Alexander is the third British artist, after Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, to have a solo exhibition at Triumph, and the first to have produced the works from within Russia, rather than simply shipping them in. Unmissable ! "
• RELOCATING TO MOSCOW AT THE RED OCTOBER STUDIO, 2014 (publication). Recorded at The House of St Barnabas, London, shortly before the production of Rastvorennaya Pechal in Moscow, this interview documents the transition between the London practice and the establishment of the Red October studio. The conversation addresses the decision to produce the forthcoming body of work entirely within Russia, including the construction of the studio, fabrication of garments and objects, and use of locally sourced materials. The Red October space is described as part of the former Einem confectionery works, connecting the new studio to the industrial history of the site. Of particular significance is the interview's account of the photographic process. Works are described as being physically constructed rather than digitally resolved, with water tanks, fabricated objects and the manipulation of the water surface forming part of the image-making process. A proposed one-tonne water vitrine further extended this process into an autonomous sculptural form. The interview also records the move towards unique photographic works and the destruction of the originating transparencies after production, alongside an expressed desire for photography to return to “complete physicality”.
• RENACIENDO, 2020 (exhibition). Renaciendo was a large-scale exhibition of analogue photography, sculpture and light installed throughout the ruins of the former Carmelite convent in Budia. The exhibition marked the reopening of the abandoned building to the public and the first presentation of the work in Spain. Developed from work made through extended periods in the Maldives marine environments, the exhibition examined the collision between natural beauty and the material consequences of industrialisation, plastic pollution and environmental degradation. Camera-less photographic works made through direct encounters between recovered materials, analogue film and natural light were presented alongside sculpture and a lighting system fabricated specifically for the architecture. The convent was not treated simply as an exhibition venue. Its roofless nave, surviving Baroque structure and changing natural light became integral to the installation. Working alone to restore the building while designing a new lighting system fabricated for the space and subsequently donated for future cultural use. Writing about Renaciendo, Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián described the exhibition as bringing together natural and cultural heritage, with the memory of the former church becoming inseparable from the works installed within it. He positioned the intervention within a wider idea of “creative ruralism”, proposing the reactivation of neglected rural architecture as a possible site for renewed cultural life beyond the metropolitan centre.
• РОССИЯ-1 NATIONAL NEWSCAST: DARK VAT, 2019 (film). Broadcast by Vesti Krasnoyarsk during the 2019 Siberian residency, the report documents Dark Vat as the physical and conceptual centre of a temporary working environment created for twelve artists selected from more than 700 applicants. At its centre was a 200 square metre body of black water, constructed over two weeks and conceived as a form of melting pot: a space in which materials, images and ideas could interact, move and change. The report follows work developing around the vat across installation, sculpture, projection and moving image, recording the residency as an active site of experimentation rather than a conventional exhibition. Water is presented throughout as both working material and wider environmental proposition, connecting the residency to a longstanding investigation of water as a physical medium and finite resource.
• RUSSIA TV NEWSCAST INSIDE RED OCTOBER STUDIO, 2014 (film). Recorded at the Red October studio in Moscow during the production of Rastvorennaya Pechal, this television interview documents the work as it was being developed for its first Russian exhibition at Triumph Gallery. The conversation establishes the studio as more than a location for photographic production. Sculpture, painting and photography are brought together within large tanks of distilled water, with light, surface tension and physical intervention determining the resulting image. The photograph is described as the documentary stage of a process that begins with the construction of the physical work itself. The interview also records the importance placed on producing Rastvorennaya Pechal entirely within Russia. The photographs, printing, darkroom work, framing, garments and botanical material were all developed or produced locally, allowing the conditions and culture of Moscow to enter directly into the formation of the work. “The photograph is just the documentary stage of what I do.” Alexander James, Red October Studio interview, Moscow, 2014
• RUSSIAN ART & CULTURE: PHOTOGRAPHY AS DOCUMENTARY MEDIUM, 2017 (publication). Published by Russian Art & Culture, this open-studio feature preserves a substantial 2014 statement on the material and temporal nature of the photographic process. The text describes photography as a documentary medium used to record physical interventions constructed before the camera: “the photograph itself becomes a way to fix and extend the work; in itself a measure of time.” Water, light and surface movement are treated as active elements within the process, while the resulting image is understood as the surviving record of an event that cannot be repeated. The same text also records the move, begun in late 2013, towards unique photographic works without editions, linking the physical singularity of the original event to the final photographic object. As a surviving contemporary statement, the publication provides an early record of ideas that would later become more fully articulated around photography as the material trace of a constructed event.
• SHIFTING PARAMETERS OF REFLECTION, 2015 (residency). FILM TWO Produced during an Artist Residency developed with Chainy, the film emerged from a four week collaborative experiment bringing together artists and creative practitioners co-selected with John Pallant, Regional Creative Director for Saatchi & Saatchi EMEA. The residency explored the studio as laboratory and the residency itself as a creative system. Artists working across moving image, sound, sculpture, music, writing and photography developed work through direct engagement with materials, processes and one another, without a predetermined outcome. At its centre was a large flooded space of black water, conceived as a shared working environment through which individual and collaborative works could develop. ´Shifting parameters of reflection´ was one of the films to emerge from this environment, performed by Aurora Barrett: written by Sophie Jane Newstead. the artists were.. Daniel McBride (composer.musician) Rae Howell (composer.musician) Katie Olds (camera operator.editor) Sophie Fenella Robins (creative writer) Sophie Newstead (creative writer) Charli Parker (production design assistant) James Butler (camera operator.editor) Eloise Stevens (creative writer)
• SALTWATER TO FRESHWATER, 1994 (expedition). A sea kayak expedition to the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, undertaken to develop practical freshwater solutions for remote coastal communities. Travelling between isolated islands, the expedition introduced a solar-powered desalination system capable of producing drinking water using only sunlight and seawater. Working alongside the indigenous Sikerei people and local fishing communities, the project combined design, environmental research and direct field testing, marking an early convergence of expeditionary practice, sustainability and community engagement that would later inform the development of Makers Place and the studio's wider circular design philosophy. The project resulted in the hand production of more than eighty Portuguese Man of War inspired freshwater bladders. Their biomimetic design allowed seawater to evaporate within the outer chamber, condensing onto an internal membrane before being channelled into a separate drinking reservoir. Guided by natural systems rather than mechanical complexity, the project demonstrated how biological forms can inspire simple, resilient solutions to real-world environmental challenges.
• OHUSLÄNS MUSEUM NATRE MORTE, 2016 (exhibition). Presented at Bohusläns Museum, Sweden, Natre Morte explored the continuing relevance of one of art history's most enduring genres through the work of leading contemporary artists. Bringing together a broad range of contemporary interpretations, the exhibition examined how the visual language of Vanitas and Nature Morte continues to evolve while remaining rooted in centuries of painterly tradition. The exhibition positioned these works within an ongoing dialogue between historical symbolism and contemporary photographic practice. An international travelling exhibition working in collaboration with Thames & Hudson.
• STILLEVEN, 2011 (exhibition). Taking its title from the Flemish word for still life, Stilleven examined the enduring relevance of the genre within contemporary practice. Historically, still life painting provided artists with an opportunity to explore the material qualities of everyday objects while reflecting upon transience, mortality and the traditions of memento mori. Bringing together artists working across diverse media, the exhibition reconsidered these themes through contemporary processes and materials. The exhibition marked the first presentation of ten works from the underwater Vanitas series together, alongside works by Matt Collinshaw, Polly Morgan, Nancy Fouts,Simon Ward, Laurent Craste and Christos Tolera.
• STUDIO AS LABORATORY — AFTER NYNE, 2015 (publication). Published in After Nyne, Studio As Laboratory presents the 2015 residency as an experiment in the conditions of artistic production rather than a programme directed towards predetermined outcomes. The studio is described as a working environment shaped by process and time, then deliberately stripped back for the residency into a “studio sized blank canvas”. A five-tonne tank of pigment-black water, a rooftop reflection pool, darkroom, cameras, piano and other materials were introduced alongside writers, composers, filmmakers and a costume designer. “I had formulated an intervention for all the raw materials and environment, at one time.” Ideas, objects and texts were then folded into one another, reconfigured and returned to the process, with each artefact capable of becoming the starting point for another. The text describes “creations that would never exist without those particular circumstances coming about”, while making clear that “what we may or may not have produced during the residency was not a primary goal.” Eloise Stevens’ accompanying account records the same structure from within the residency. None of the eight selected artists knew where the work would lead, and the studio was deliberately prepared without a brief or fixed final image: “I don’t want to force them into a flavour but to see what happens in the clinical environment of an underwater studio that has been pre-prepared for them.” The publication also records the resulting crossings between photography, moving image, writing and music. Stevens distinguishes the singular moment of the photograph from the temporal forms developing around it, while participants describe the studio as a place where different practices could alter one another through direct exchange.
• STUDIO INTERNATIONAL: RASTVORENNAYA PECHAL, 2014 (publication). Published on 5 May 2014, Anna McNay’s interview for Studio International followed the opening of *Rastvorennaya Pechal (Dissolved Ennui)* at Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 18 April – 11 May 2014. Six months earlier, Alexander James had moved his studio from London to a 250-square-metre space in Red October, the former chocolate factory in central Moscow. He describes bringing seven tonnes of studio equipment to Russia and spending his first six weeks preparing the disused building, including the removal of 17 cubic metres of contaminated soil and three truckloads of accumulated building waste. The interview records the making of the exhibition with a local Russian crew, from hand-sewn garments and constructed props to live models suspended in water. James discusses the one-tonne *Veiled Crucifixion* vitrine, his use of water as an optical medium, and the production of photographic transparencies exposed on film and processed by hand in the studio. Asked what he hoped to leave behind in Russia, he replied: “Memory. Memory of why I came here, what I created here. And the wonderful friendships I have made. That is legacy enough for me.”
• TAXI, 2010 (exhibition). Presented at Ann330 Gallery, Los Angeles, ´Taxi´ marked the first major American exhibition of work from the Tokyo Taxi series. The exhibition coincided with publication of the first monograph, introducing this body of work to a wider international audience and establishing it as one of the defining projects of the early photographic practice. Produced entirely in camera using analogue photography, the photographs transformed Tokyo's nocturnal landscape into luminous studies of colour, reflection and atmosphere. Rather than documenting the city, the exhibition presented light itself as the principal material of the image, anticipating many of the questions surrounding perception and photographic form explored throughout later work.
• DARK VAT, 2019 (residency). Established in 2019, Dark Vat transformed a disused Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, into an international artist residency and cultural programme. Developed in collaboration with regional organisations, the residency brought together artists, writers and photographers through exhibitions, workshops and studio production, while reconnecting the site's photographic heritage with contemporary practice. The programme culminated in a museum standard public exhibition and extensive regional media coverage, leaving a lasting cultural legacy that continues to influence the city's creative community today.
• THE COLOUR CANDY, 2006 (exhibition). Presented at g&A Studios, Sydney, from 1 to 19 March 2006, *The Colour Candy* was a solo exhibition bringing together more than forty photographic works made during journeys through Tokyo and Shanghai, alongside *Flight* and the abstract *Working Water* series photographed around international shipping harbours. The exhibition combined large-format prints, film and projection, moving between urban observation, travel and the movement of water, ships, people and light. The photographs were made primarily on Hasselblad medium-format film and presented “as shot”. The contemporary press release described this approach as the “in camera” purity of the personal work, deliberately distinguishing it from the processes then associated with commercial photography. The exhibition was reviewed by Tracey Clement in the Sydney Morning Herald, where works from the Tokyo series, were singled out as images of lime-greens glowing “like beacons in a pitch-black night”.
• THE ILLUSION OF OIL, 2016 (exhibition). An exhibition organised in collaboration with the UK Culture & Trade Industries Board to inaugurate the newly constructed Iset Tower in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Bringing together works from Swarm, Glass and a new body of oil on canvas paintings, the exhibition also featured a site-specific bullet lighting installation developed by the artists for the opening. The project marked the beginning of an enduring relationship with the Ural region, laying the foundations for the Siberian expeditions and Oil + Water investigations that would later form a significant part of The Photograph As Event.
• THE LOOP, 2019 (film). The Loop condenses many of the visual ideas explored throughout the Dark Vat programme into a single continuous sequence. Built around symmetry and the cyclical behaviour of time and light, the work investigates how optical events can generate the illusion of infinite depth and perpetual motion. Developed within the collaborative environment of the residency, the film reflects the continual exchange of ideas between artists working across photography, installation, performance, writing and sound. Individual experiments were repeatedly absorbed into one another, evolving through conversation, shared making and collective enquiry until distinct disciplines began to dissolve into a common visual language. Conceived as a self-contained moving image, the film occupies the space between analogue observation and digital construction, extending the wider research into perception, reflection and the physical behaviour of light through an evolving visual loop. The Loop 4K film, duration 1 min 58 sec Director of Photography: Alexander James Hamilton Digital Lead Artist: Inna Shestakova Digital Artist: Alexey Shidlovsky Generative soundtrack
• THE MOSCOW TIMES: MOVING TO MOSCOW, 2013 (publication). Published on 16 September 2013, Arts Editor D. Garrison Golubock’s interview for The Moscow Times records progress during a planning visit to Moscow, ahead of his proposed relocation of the studio and a new exhibition with Triumph Gallery. Discussing *Vanitas* and *Intersection*, James describes the construction of sculptural scenes within tanks of purified water, the cultivation of flowers, breeding of butterflies and preparation of materials before their exposure on film. He describes photography as “purely a documentary act” within a much longer process of physical construction. The interview also records the development of *Transparency of a Dream*, in which the original photographic transparency becomes the artwork rather than a reproducible print. Recalling a conversation with a Guggenheim curator about the perceived value of painting and photography, and his determination to remove reproducibility from the equation. Published before the Moscow studio was established, the article preserves the intentions and working principles that preceded *Rastvorennaya Pechal* in 2014.
• THE REFUSED COMMISSION - PALAZZO VERSACE DUBAI, 2010 (project). In 2007 the studio was weeks away from flying to Dubai to photograph a long-standing commercial hotel client's new property ahead of its opening. Months of planning were already in place. The property was Palazzo Versace Dubai, and the client's publicised intention was to refrigerate its beachfront with coolant pipes laid beneath the sand, blowers installed to manufacture a sea breeze so that guests would not burn their feet. Its developer had said so on the record, Soheil Abedian, co-founder of Sun-land Group, the resort's Australian development partner stated: "We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on. This is the kind of luxury that top people want." On discovering this, Alexander James Hamilton declined the brief. "I have refused major projects to the great detriment of the business, because I have strongly disagreed with an ethical position on the business model… Imagine the power consumption of a four acre fridge in the middle of the desert, and leaving the door open." The refusal was not a private decision. It was published in AOP´s IMAGE MAGAZINE, the journal of the Association of Photographers, in the same issue that carried his work on the cover and it closed the feature. The studio's supplier and client ethical policy had by then been in force for eight years: all energy drawn from renewable sources, carbon offset on every travel booking, green supply throughout. "It took no time at all to reject the brief. It sounds foolish now, as I know there would be ten suitably qualified photographers ready to take over the job within minutes, but that's just it really. I wouldn't be doing it." The hotel opened in November 2015 on Dubai Creek with three pools, and no beach. The chilled sand concept was never realised. read the wider press reaction to the announcement... CLADglobal, 18 Dec 2008 Palazzo Versace Dubai to build chilled beach https://www.cladglobal.com/CLADnews/architecture-design/Palazzo-Versace-Dubai-to-build-chilled-beach/99183 NPR, 16 Dec 2008 Cool sand likely to make environmentalists hot https://www.npr.org/2008/12/16/98323321/cool-sand-likely-to-make-environmentalists-hot National Geographic Chillin' (on) the Beach in Dubai https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/airconditioned_beach
• TOKYO TAXI, 1988 - 2011 (project). Created during extended periods living and working in Tokyo, Tokyo Taxi became one of the earliest sustained investigations into light, reflection and the physical behaviour of the photographic image. Produced exclusively at night using analogue photography, the project explored the city's extraordinary visual energy, transforming familiar streets into luminous studies that bordered on abstraction while remaining rooted entirely in direct observation. Published as the first monograph by Merrell and exhibited internationally, the series established many of the ideas that would continue to evolve throughout the practice. Rather than recording Tokyo as a place, the photographs examined how light itself could become both subject and material, revealing fleeting physical events that existed only for an instant before the camera. Viewed today, Tokyo Taxi marks the beginning of a four-decade investigation into photography as a physical event, laying the conceptual foundations for later bodies of work including Vanitas, Oil + Water and Cymatic Water + Light.
• MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART WARSAW, 2017 (exhibition). Presented as part of the international exhibition Nature Morte, organised in conjunction with the Thames & Hudson publication of the same name, Vanitas explored the continuing relevance of one of art history's most enduring genres. Exhibited alongside leading contemporary artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Four Domes Pavilion, Warsaw, the exhibition examined how the language of the still life continues to evolve through contemporary practice while remaining rooted in the traditions of seventeenth-century painting.
• OIL + WATER, 2013 - 2023 (expedition). A decade long series of remote photographic expeditions exploring the physical relationship between crude oil, fresh water and light across the frozen landscapes of central Siberia. Working in temperatures below −40°C, large volumes of river water were combined with crude oil under precisely controlled field conditions, allowing naturally occurring physical processes to determine the final image. Rather than illustrating environmental concerns, the expedition investigated the behaviour of matter itself, treating the landscape as both laboratory and collaborator. Many of the observations made during these field experiments would later form the foundation of The Photograph As Event, demonstrating how photography can function as the direct record of physical events rather than their representation.
• VISIONS FROM THE SHORELINE - LONDON, 2017 (exhibition). *Visions from the Shoreline*, an exhibition with Dellasposa Gallery, presented a body of unique camera-less PhotoGrams made during an extended period of living and working in the Maldives. The project returned to locations first visited in the late 1980s, combining letters, texts, Polaroid studies, installation works and direct-to-film photographic plates. The works emerged from direct encounters with an environment undergoing rapid material change, particularly the accumulation of plastic waste within coral reef systems and remote island communities. Working from a temporary plein air studio, materials were recovered while free-diving and placed directly onto photographic film plates. Exposures were made without a camera, using moonlight and the setting sun, allowing the environmental conditions of each location to participate directly in the formation of the image. The individual works retained the geographical coordinates of their making, establishing the series as both photographic objects and records of specific encounters within Baa Atoll. The exhibition extended beyond the presentation of the photographs. Twenty illuminated works were donated to raise funds for the creation of a community recycling facility in the Maldives, intended to process plastic waste locally and return it as usable material. The project connected the sale of the artworks directly to the construction of environmental infrastructure, moving the consequences of the photographic process back into the landscape from which the works originated. *Visions from the Shoreline* therefore marked a convergence within the practice: environmental observation, analogue photographic process and direct intervention were no longer separate activities, but parts of a single system in which the making and circulation of the artwork could produce a material consequence beyond the exhibition itself.
• VISIONS FROM THE SHORELINE - STUDIO FUND, 2020 (project). Following the completion of Visions from the Shoreline, twenty illuminated PhotoGrams from the series, made from ocean waste and plastic recovered while free-diving the coral reefs of the region. These were sold and donated specifically to raise the funds required to build The Makers' Place. Through Soneva's Namoona Foundation, the sale generated a fund of £100,000, which was allocated and managed by Alexander to design and build the facility from the ground up .Makers Place remains fully operational today. A wooden plaque is installed permanently within the facility records the connection between the artist, series and the building it financed.
• VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE - PAPER, 2025 (publication). Published by Interalia Magazine in its June 2026 issue, Visualizing the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event examines an investigation into photography as physical event rather than descriptive mechanism. Moving from the caustic structures of Vanitas, Glass and A Beautiful Announcement of Death through to Cymatic Water + Light, the essay considers water, light, pressure, frequency and resonance as active components within constructed photographic systems. The resulting images are understood not as representations of these forces, but as their material consequence. The text develops the position of the artist as system builder, locating authorship in the establishment of conditions through which otherwise invisible physical relationships become temporarily visible and can be fixed directly onto analogue film. The original publication can be found at.. https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/alexander-hamilton-visualizing-the-invisible-resonance-water-and-light-as-photographic-event/
• VOICE OF RUSSIA - RADIO INTERVIEW, 2013 (publication). Broadcast by Voice of Russia UK on 11 February 2014, this interview was recorded during the first months of the Red October studio, while the works for Rastvorennaya Pechal were still in production and more than two months before the exhibition opened at Triumph Gallery. The conversation documents the practical scale of the undertaking: the journey from London to Moscow with the studio transported by road, the occupation of a long-abandoned space within the former Red October chocolate factory, and the construction of large water systems required to produce the work. Sculptural compositions were made by hand before being submerged and photographed, with the camera described as the final stage of an extended physical process. The interview also records the importance attached to making the work within Russia rather than producing an exhibition elsewhere and transporting it into the country. The character of the Red October building and the conditions encountered in Moscow are described as influences upon what would eventually be produced there. Recorded while the project remained unresolved, the broadcast provides a contemporary account of the studio at a formative moment, before the completed works or exhibition could determine how the period would subsequently be understood. “The space has a wonderful aura. It’s dangerous as hell, but there’s something about it, the work that will be created there will be very much influenced by the surroundings.”
• WATER LIGHT, 2015 (residency). FILM THREE Produced during an Artist Residency developed with Chainy, the film emerged from a four week collaborative experiment bringing together artists and creative practitioners co-selected with John Pallant, Regional Creative Director for Saatchi & Saatchi EMEA. The residency explored the studio as laboratory and the residency itself as a creative system. Artists working across moving image, sound, sculpture, music, writing and photography developed work through direct engagement with materials, processes and one another, without a predetermined outcome. At its centre was a large flooded space of black water, conceived as a shared working environment through which individual and collaborative works could develop. ´Water Light´ was one of the films to emerge from this environment, performed by Alexandra Rachel Mai: written by Sophie Fenella Robins the artists were.. Daniel McBride (composer.musician) Rae Howell (composer.musician) Katie Olds (camera operator.editor) Sophie Fenella Robins (creative writer) Sophie Newstead (creative writer) Charli Parker (production design assistant) James Butler (camera operator.editor) Eloise Stevens (creative writer)
• WORKING WATER, 2008 (exhibition). *Working Water* developed through repeated encounters with the working harbours of Sydney, London and Shanghai, photographing the meeting point between water and the immense structures of commercial shipping. Made on medium-format film, the photographs concentrate on the constantly changing surfaces around ships: painted hulls, reflected light, wakes, harbour water and the distortions created as these elements move against one another. The scale of the vessels is often reduced to fragments, allowing industrial structures and moving water to become almost abstract fields of colour, texture and light. Works from the series were already exhibited as part of *The Colour Candy* in Sydney in 2006, where contemporary material described *Working Water* as an abstract series made around heavy shipping activity in international harbours. The investigation was subsequently presented at RCP Gallery, Sydney, in 2008.
• ZERO WASTE MAKERS — SUBLIME, 2021 (publication). Published by Sublime in July 2021, Zero Waste Makers documents the establishment of Makers Place at Soneva Fushi, described as the world's first zero-carbon plastic and aluminium recycling studio. The article records the design and hand fabrication of the facility and its machinery specifically for an island-based methodology. Closed-loop water treatment, two-stage filtration using granular media and coconut charcoal, and VOC extraction were incorporated into a system designed to transform waste plastic and aluminium into building materials, functional objects and sculptural works. The publication also traces the environmental work preceding Makers Place, connecting it to earlier marine fieldwork and Visions from the Shoreline, a body of photographic and sculptural work made from material recovered from the marine environment. Twenty works from the series were subsequently received by Makers Place and the Soneva Namoona Foundation. Published as the facility became fully operational, the article provides a contemporary record of the transition from environmental fieldwork and artwork into the design and construction of functioning recycling infrastructure.