For Hamilton Sulit, life is like a procession: a long walk leading to nowhere and everywhere, hand in hand to all life’s uncertainties and mysteries. In his life and artistic practice, he slowly navigates the paths of our consciousness that deal with philosophical and spiritual aspects of human nature. His works are a collective reference to the human condition that deals with ideas of birth, age, death and dying, identity and memory.

Each work is ripe with meaning. The works are made with different mediums, using oil and acrylics on canvas, non-sag epoxies and shreds of black carbon residue.

Divine expedition is about transformation, the idea of leaving and living, about the past and future. The figures, composed of two male figures, could be father and son, brothers, or a friend or his former self bidding farewell to each other. The stars are symbols of wounds, lessons and rules that had been imposed, some permanently imprinted like traumas and childhood memories. What makes it divine is its mystery that awaits in the darkness of life uncertainties and for our will to take steps toward it.

The birth of hope, the beginning and endings offers a narrow point of view about love, aging, and dying; a fantasy in an imagined reality that we, somehow would end up with the arms of someone we love while The Guardian suggests the arrival of a certain age and time. Seated over the pool of wisdom, worn out by life experience and encounters, capturing a handful of stars in his torch-like candelabra, spreading its light for the newcomers. He is the gatekeeper, a guide on a deep sunless sea of life’s uncertainties.

Like leaves gliding through the wind 1-3 is a series of works that narrates stories of solitude, contemplation and introspection, a more personal experience than an imagined reality. A sort of confrontation with the artist’s self about the horrors of living, of being lost, death and dying but with a little semblance of hope, to move forward. Here, the stars are like guides, a magical fantasy or a spear that pierced us. Like the title suggests, it feels like he is slowly moving places to places where the winds take him, from the old and to the new territories waiting to be explored. Everything seems linked, interwoven somehow. That’s why all the background of the works seems identical: the artist wanted to create a domestic atmosphere yet somehow uncharted.

Strange Familiarity 1-5 might be references of the people we met, a visual representation of a period of time and thoughts, some might be momentary feelings that pass by, a ghost, a shadow, a foreign sensation or a familiar one. Human interaction and encounters. there is no specific which is which. Each time Sulit looked at them they changed into something else, they conjured a new identity with a new narrative. As we move forward in this procession of life, we are confronted with familiar things and feelings.

At the end of the procession of life, we can only hope that the end offers some peaceful resolve and a chance to look back at our tracks – even if only for one last time.

• Hamilton Sulit and Nikki Ignacio