Bubbles of Life: A Vanitas Perspective on Mortality and Beauty

The Bubbles series explores impermanence, fragility, and reflection through the interaction of air, water, and light. Suspended within an underwater environment, bubbles become both subject and metaphor-ephemeral forms that exist momentarily before dissolving, echoing long-standing Vanitas traditions concerned with the transience of life.

These works are created through direct physical intervention with water, where subtle gestures applied to surface tension shape light into fluid, painterly compositions. Rather than depicting a fixed object, each image records a fleeting event: a brief equilibrium between buoyancy, resistance, and collapse.

Historically, bubbles have appeared in still-life painting as symbols of vanity and mortality, their delicate beauty inseparable from their inevitable disappearance. This series extends that symbolic language into an aquatic space, where reflection and refraction soften boundaries and allow form to hover between emergence and erasure.

Light plays a central role, passing through liquid and air to produce luminous fields that recall the depth and tonal subtlety of painting. The resulting images resist clear categorisation, occupying a space between photographic record and abstract meditation, where material process and illusion converge.

Produced entirely in-camera, the Bubbles works form part of a broader investigation into water as both medium and meaning. Within The Legacy Collection, they function as archival studies of transience, offering a contemporary reflection on mortality, perception, and the fragile balance that underpins existence.

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