Liquid Lament: Religious Figures Submerged in Underwater Art

The Figurative works form a pivotal body within the artist's practice, bringing the human figure into dialogue with water, architecture, and endurance. Created entirely underwater, these images extend the language of figurative painting into a submerged space where gravity, time, and control are fundamentally altered.

This series was developed within a purpose-built underground studio environment, where large-scale spaces were transformed into flooded working conditions. The physical context of the work-isolated, submerged, and sustained over long durations-became inseparable from the images themselves, shaping both their psychological intensity and formal restraint.

Drawing on traditions of Baroque and Romantic painting, the figurative compositions reference art historical archetypes while rejecting theatrical reconstruction. Instead, each image records a real, lived event: performers suspended in water, light articulated through movement, and form slowly emerging through physical resistance rather than compositional certainty.

Water functions simultaneously as symbol and method. It disrupts clarity, softens edges, and imposes limitation, transforming gesture into something slower, weighted, and fragile. Through this process, the figurative subject becomes both present and vulnerable, held in a suspended state between appearance and disappearance.

Produced entirely in-camera, these works stand as singular records of a larger conceptual and physical undertaking. Within The Legacy Collection, the Figurative series operates as an archive of endurance, commitment, and transformation, reflecting on memory, mortality, and the persistence of human presence within unstable environments.

All images in this series are available as rights-managed works for editorial, institutional, and creative use.