A figure floats underwater beneath a pure twenty four carat gold halo, photographed on analogue eight by ten inch film plates. The image speaks to a long lineage of Ophelia depictions, from John Everett Millais’s Ophelia made in the eighteen fifties to Paul Delaroche’s La Jeune Martyre, where a ring of light names both grace and foreboding. The work invites a reading of beauty as an announcement of loss. Intimate, luminous, and resolved entirely in camera.
