GABORIT HAMILTON RONALD

"The first major work by Anthea Hamilton, Delphine Gaborit and Lewis Ronald, GaboritHamiltonRonald is an artist book made collaboratively. Titled by a grouping of their three surnames it is suggestive of the branding of a corporate merger. The form of the book itself is large, white, hardback whose interior is exactly 5mm thick. Its leathered surface withholds author or title, and is instead wrapped in sugar paper stamped with a list of participants. The cast that make up GaboritHamiltonRonald includes artists, photographers, creative directors, dancers and poets. Inside, a suite of twenty-five photographs, made in the span of a few months in early 2026, are organised around a 100-year-old poem by Marianne Moore. The only piece of text in the book, Moore’s To A Snail, speaks to an aesthetic of restraint; a love letter to density, pressure, structure and compactness. In Moore’s poem, style – considered formally, linguistically, and choreographically – becomes muscular, capable of both tension and controlled release. Simultaneously intimate and analytical, To A Snail affords “a knowledge of principles” to the photographs’ semi-anonymous portraits – details of hands, spines, lips, legs, buttocks, ears, and hair – and still lives. In lieu of adornment, snail meets surface, hand meets hip, sea meets shore. The poem finally meets it’s twin by an image of hibernating snails. Where a snail’s ventral foot would typically meet a horizontal surface totally and entirely, here a grouping congregates at the very tip of a weathered twig: poised and condensed upon shared coordinates."