A day of hot sunshine. In this recessed garage entrance, shielded from the sun, the air is thick and static. Residues of hot car tyres and tarmac, exhaust fumes and paint. The building itself is a calamine lotion pink, painted all over, even in these places that people don’t really go or see very often. I captured an intersection of wall and cupboard, painted chevron floor slanting off into the distance. Bright turquoise, vivid against the chalky pink, the traffic yellow floor paint seems dull and yet jarring next to them. Fire-engine red obligatory safety panels hover in the corner – they draw the eye down the line of the planes’ interaction.
Flattened in a photographic image these planes become irregular, yet geometric shapes. No curves, only straight lines. There is definite movement up and out of the shot, what seems to be a trademark diagonal in my photographs. A sense of movement even in this dank stifling place. The lack of bright light means there are no shadows, all the surfaces have the same ambient tone, the pink at the back of the space is as the pink at the front. Only the perspective tells us there is depth here, the lines indicating a travelling of space. If you squint the subtle differences in shading disappear and the areas of colour become abstracted even more. Is this compelling in the same way? Does it matter that things become indistinguishable, that reality is lost to the arrangement of elements within a rectangle?
I capture so many assemblages of urban architectural features like this. The shorthand of diagonal lines and intersections worries me. Have I inadvertently created a mono-view of the world? Am I lazy in my interpretation, the twist of the camera so that the orthogonal becomes the diagonal. Even in words I struggle to find a simile, a synonym that works here. There are moments when I feel pleased with my obvious tells. That someone, one day, might look at my images and say, ‘Melody took that shot’. I have remarked before that photography is my drawing. It enables me to capture and record the things I see, in a way that I could not do with a pencil. It allows me to flatten space, to turn the three dimensional into a textile of interactions in a single plane. Form becomes tesserae, a giant puzzle of interlocking pieces. But, contemplating the world through my lens, one would be forgiven for feeling slightly off-kilter, as if the world according to Melody is a fun house amusement, the floor tilted so that everything slants. Nothing is horizontal. I see my images in series, one after the other, a gap of time and space between. So rarely are they all presented in one moment. And I think about this and wonder if it would be too much to bear. Too many angles, too much off balance. Perhaps it needs something ordinary and still to counteract the insistent movement towards the horizon. My tendency to stretch out towards things not yet here.