Scarlett Carlos Clarke’s haunting photo series The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night began with a singular vision that arrived fully formed in the photographer’s mind. “I started making these pictures in 2017 after the birth of my son. I never set out to make a series, I just had one clear image I knew I wanted to make.”
This initial image eventually evolved into 12 vignettes – each depicting a kind of unsettling fever dream of domestic life, closeted by carpet and condensation-riddled double-glazing, lit by the eerie blue light of the television or the fluorescent strip light of the utility room. Eight of these photographs have now been reproduced in a new photo book (published by Mörel) accompanied by an atmospheric text by writer Nathalie Olah.
The pictures show scenes and characters we’re all familiar with, somehow. Carlos Clarke impregnates them with little details anchoring them in the recognisable landscape of British working class homes – vertical blinds, boxes of Pampers and Daz, sofas with frilly skirting, family-size bottles of Iron Bru, three bar fires. But there’s a sort of glamour here too. The slightly kitsch interiors and the vacant figures in The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night recall Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home – portraits of his parents in their eerily perfect timecapsule Palm Springs ranch-style house – but instead of being illuminated by the Southern Californian sun, Carlos Clarke’s characters are lit by the telly.
“I wanted to make pictures that felt familiar but also dreamlike and uncanny,” Carlos Clark tells us in the wake of the book’s release. “The pictures reference real life, films, books and advertising. An amalgamation of sources helped me build layered narratives from all the stuff I’ve been nerding out over all my life, all the stuff I’ve saved over the years, configured into one tableaux. They are cinematic re-creations of the everyday, the mundane.”
Featuring a cast of family and friends, the starting point for each portrait were the locations and interiors. “I spent a lot of time researching, driving around finding houses I liked the look of, the characters were then born out of that place. I remember having little sketches for where characters would be in a scene and how I would light it,” she recalls. “The dirty bunny slippers I actually stole from Nick Waplington’s Living Room.”
Turning the pages of The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night, the photographs all suggest incubation – inert figures prostate on three-piece suites and enveloped in front rooms, separated from us by hermetically sealed French windows. As well as this pervasive sense of the home as a kind of slightly claustrophobic incubator, the series also features more than one naked, heavily pregnant figure – another more literal form of incubation. But, for all the velour and bolster pillows and foot pouffes, it’s not a cosy vision of home life. Infants are left to cry while mums or babysitters lay glassy-eyed and entranced by the tv screen.
Carlos Clarke says the project was begun after she became a mother, but the project isn’t consciously commenting on motherhood or childhood. “My pictures aren’t autobiographical in that they’re not directly related to actual things that happen to me, but I think there’s always a relationship between life and art,” she says. “There is a sense of alienation and loneliness that is more obvious to me now than when I was making the work.”
Visit the gallery above for a closer look.
Scarlett Carlos Clarke’s The Smell of Calpol on a Warm Summer’s Night is published by Mörel and available to order here now.
