Andrea Hamilton
"Water Works"

Exhibition: 24 September - 6 October 2014

The exhibition Water Works features two bodies of work on the notion of ‘water’. The projects Tidal Resonance and Luminous Icescapes were developed during the past few years in Florida, Alaska and Iceland. Both series of images are placed in relation to each other and also to the gallery space and to the movement of the viewer.

The photographs in Tidal Resonance depict the echoes, natural sounds and languages of the ocean. Hamilton aims to grasp the essence of haiku poems, a very short form of Japanese poetry often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a cutting word between them. Haiku poems have the power to provoke images, impressions and traces of memory in the reader's minds. Haiku transforms a short sentence into an imaginary photograph. In Tidal Resonance, the artist approaches the subject from this poetic perspective, while in Luminous Icescapes she looks at the importance of the climate change through the representation of sculptural icebergs that appeared like diamonds scattered on the beach. For all their monumentality, they are vulnerable and contingent, caught in a moment of melting, fracturing, depleting, returning to the ocean. Throughout her work, Hamilton addresses the contemporary anxieties surrounding our changing natural world and speaks to our human values and our relationship with the environment and the world.

"If we consider the uncanny as an image or event that requires us to rethink how we look at or understand something, there is a sense that Hamilton's petrified waves reveal both an emerging, nascent formation - the wave - alongside a highly personalised historical document of that wave's passing."
Text: Anthony Downey, Director of the Master's Programme in Contemporary Art at Sotheby's Institute of Art London

The exhibition Water Works includes a series of events and to accompany the occasion an illustrated catalogue has been published with original texts by Rabih Hage, Anthony Downey and Benjamin Eastham, among others.

Andrea Hamilton (Lima, 1968) graduated from Brown University with a Degree in Comparative Literature and Politics. She was recipient of a scholarship from the Italian Consulate to study Italian Art History in Florence and Siena (1987). Hamilton went on to complete a Law Degree from Oxford University (1994), and a Masters of Law (LLM) from NYU Law School. Following this, Hamilton joined S.G. Warburg as an Equity Analyst in Latin American Mining working both in New York and London. Her career in mining inspired her love of landscape and desire to protect the environment. Her mother, an artist and an interior designer, inspired Hamilton and invited her to follow her steps. She completed the Contemporary Professional Photographic Course at Photofusion and a course on traditional print methods at the Black and White School, both in London. She has exhibited at the Black and White Gallery, Photofusion, the David Gill Gallery (London), Royal Photographic Society 155th International Print Exhibition (London), The Art Council Annual Juried Exhibition (Florida) and Real People Exhibition 2011 for the Old Court House Art Center (Woodstock). In addition, Hamilton has been awarded with the AOP Open Awards in 2011 and 2013 and a Sony World Photography Award in 2012.