A double page spread of photographs look as though they are on fire. In the left of the two, a man stands framed in a domestic doorway, apparently absorbed in reading something. A chair, towel and bath are visible behind while swirling around him are swathes of orange, gold and vivid green. The light and the colour obliterate the darkened walls of his home, on the edge of engulfing him. In the right-hand photograph, the same fiery light dominates, rapidly surrounding an hourglass with falling sand centred in the image’s frame.
These urgent and extraordinary works are just two from a book of thirty-five chemically altered Polaroids made by London-based photographer Nicola Muirhead which have gathered much-deserved acclaim in recent months. Titled Unseen, the publication offers up globally resonant but intensely personal experiences of the pandemic through raw, emotional photographs that span portraiture, still life, landscape and depictions of her home.
Muirhead achieves a range of significant visual effects through the application of household cleaning products, including hand sanitiser, to her Polaroid surfaces; their potent chemicals stripping and reconfiguring the colours of each work, making them into something new, painterly and other. Each photograph holds violence and creativity; love and destruction; cleanliness, resistance, forgetting. The pandemic is subject, material and context here.
Layers of colour, pattern and texture are in some cases evocative of close-up microorganisms and disease, and of the escalating ecological crisis too, being reminiscent of coral formations, trees or ice crystals. The physical transformations of each photograph echo the ways in which our ideas of home and of time’s passing, for instance, have also changed over the past two years. Various art historical traditions are drawn upon, particularly the potency of memento mori, which influences the publication’s small details and wider expanses. Washing up gloves, flowers, empty bus seats, cliffs and views across the Thames are all given over to close private examination, to a slow unfolding as pages are turned. It is important that these image pages can be held, touched. This mode of display feels right given the nature of the work and its specific contexts.
In the photograph preceding the fire-lit images, a scene with a tree-lined park is clouded over with green, yellow and blue tones. The landscape is in places foxed with dark spots; in others, as though a crackle glaze has coated the surface. Either way, it is marked and broken, quieter yet still impactful. This more dreamy, melancholic tone can also be seen in the portraits printed in these pages, some of which are details of mouths and of hands clasping. Unseen begins and ends with fragmented writing from Muirhead and by quotes from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 experimental novel The Waves. Woolf writes “I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world”. Ultimately, this is what Muirhead’s publication offers us: a silent space in which to reflect and in which to scream.
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Unseen by Nicola Muirhead was published by Another Place Press (June 2021) and reviewed for Photomonitor by Anneka French
