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about Anthea Hamilton

For nearly two decades, artist Anthea Hamilton has developed a complex practice that spans sculpture, installation, film, and performance. Her work is characterised by devotional creativity, positivity and flexibility, unexpected research trajectories, highly visual aesthetics, cross cultural interests, interdisciplinary modes of production, and collaborative dynamics. Hamilton dives into the meandering history of visual and cultural production, using her eye as a both subjective and productive lens through which to view (and recreate) the world. Her installations propose an alternative and fragmented reality where gender roles, sexualities, domestic life and the traditions of different cultures are no longer seen as established clichés but as fluid notions.

Using the “mash up” as her method, she filters and assesses elements culled from the present and recent past of fashion, art, food, nature, design, architecture, and pop culture. She then resituates what we might otherwise consider familiar or comforting tropes and motifs in order to sidestep obvious and hegemonic meanings. To do this, the artist uses diverse techniques and materials such as digital prints, galvanised steel, and bespoke woven fabric or blown glass, drawing on both high tech and craftsmanship, moving without restraint from low to high, classic to pop, hip hop to art nouveau. Hamilton’s practice relies on a strong belief in cohabitation, complexity and, by extension, imagination, positing the artworks’ ambiguity as a means to constantly challenge our perceived realities.

(courtesy of M HKA)