January 5, 2012 |
Cut-out silhouettes of her own legs, as thin as a plane of wood, are seemingly ready to be rolled in from the wings. There’s a similar ad hoc feel to her sculptural assemblages – in one memorable work, a torn poster of Luke Perry, hangs from a column, topped by a grey cauliflower that doubles as the pin-up’s brain. Giant photographic prints of heart-throb men have been hung like stage curtains, or attached to scaffolding like background scenery. Kinky footwear, designer furniture and beautiful bodies abound in Hamilton’s dramas of desire and seduction, in which we’re the actors.
Your works using pin-up posed cutouts of your own legs have become something of a signature. What is it about this motif?
“Legs set the scale of a work; they gender it, they’re not expressive like hands or a face, they cross eras, cross cultures, they’re democratic. They create implied movement, just like Egyptian or Assyrian bas-reliefs. It makes the work resolutely interpersonal.
Your work is full of beautiful people and erotic, fetishised bits of bodies, be that an image of Luke Perry, platform boots or the Perspex-legs/chair sculpture series, recalling Sharon Stone’s famous leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct. It’s also extremely funny.
“The Sharon Stone reference made me think of that photo of Christine Keeler, her genitalia in that famous photo is so overtly drawn attention to by being guarded and hidden. In the Leg Chair series, the legs are wedged apart by the brass seat and hinges, but have the nuance of chastity belts, too. They’re called chairs, but you can’t sit of them. Instead they’re fetishised objects, prototypes, instant design classics. To discuss the work using only overtly sexual terms becomes grotesque. It’s also highly formal, but then to focus on this aspect alone is prudish. Looking at the work stimulates a consideration of both and this overlap, the non-verbal moment, is where it’s really happening.”
What was the idea behind Aquarius, scaffolding bearing the image of a beautiful man with his legs spread, which you created on the roof of the Peckham car park last summer?
“Aquarius was a collaged composition – the photographic image superimposed upon the skyline, on top of a concrete structure that can be seen from the train and other elevated views in the city and an architectural entity – and a monumental facade and doorway, without practical function yet with performative potential. The bar on his shoulders measures out the skyline behind him and the sun sets between his legs. Formally, it was an homage to the video for David Bowie’s Heroes and the Colossus of Rhodes. It gave me an opportunity to play out an interest in Supermannerist architecture I’d been researching. His Vitruvian Man pose gives us another reading, and that he’s handsome and he knows it is like baroque ornamentation.”
Will your next works be similarly user-friendly?
“I’m often asked what the role of performance and audience interaction is and I’d suggest it is a courtship. Next I’m making a film as one of the Frieze Film commissions. All the motifs and research from the past few years finally making their return back to the screen. We’ll see… ”
by Skye Sherwin
