This ongoing series of drawings and paintings draws on photographs of antique objects and jewellery found in auction catalogues. Translated through a forensic painting and drawing process, questions of death, value, labour and ownership emerge.

The series considers value as a social relation. Made for those with surplus wealth, these objects signify luxury, refinement, conspicuous consumption, and the confidence of a class that imagined its position as secure. Yet their appearance in auction catalogues also suggests rupture: death, inheritance, decline, or a shift in fortune. They register both the display of wealth and its instability.

The objects also point beyond wealth and ownership to the social and economic relations embedded in them: extraction, labour, skill, mined stones and metals, specialist tools, trained hands and inherited techniques. They echo art-making as objects produced through attention, material transformation and the concentration of time, but also as luxury goods: signs of surplus wealth circulating through systems of display, ownership, investment and exchange.

Through painting and drawing, Andrew slows these images down, shifting them from transaction into sustained attention. The works ask what objects hold, what they conceal, and what histories of labour, loss, desire and ownership make value possible.