In The Night Factory

It rained, I could tell before as the clouds were coming over. After a week of hot sun at last some liquid to cool the air. The puddles were receding and I decided to go out with my camera. I saw a documentary about Tarkovsky recently and one of Tarkovsky's close colleagues had observed the director one evening during a freak thunderstorm. The rain was hitting the windows with force and a puddle was forming inside a door in the house they were staying in. Tarkovsky stood watching this build up of water until the storm had finished its flashing and pounding of the building. The clouds dispersed and warm sunlight slowly entered through the windows. Tarkovsky stayed by the window to watch the puddle that had formed recede and dry up over a period of a couple of hours. In this time the wet mark changed its colours, fading until the floor was as it had been before the storm had begun. The seeping of the water into the house and receding back into the atmosphere fixed Tarkovky's attention and he stayed staring at the area long after the water had gone.

The water had seeped in under the shelter by several feet. A mixture of the opening sunlight, the rain and the spongy quality of the surface had created an unlimited number of subtle effects on the slabs, thin canals of green moss flowed in-between. The moisture illuminating the years of usage, the fine grained layers of interaction seeped down into the concrete, making up an almost visceral scaled effect.

Edges of constructions where government road teams had made errors, although the pleasure of filling those frames of stone with a flood of tar and then to watch it dry and grow old with time like the battered skin of a drum, must have been interesting. The shingle of grit and fag ends creates textures that are highlighted by the receding moisture of the rain.



Where the man had ran out of wood stain and the rain had run the bird muck down.



On the pavements of the back roads where the people live on the outskirts of an average town, the rain had come down. Then the sunlight appeared like a grey glow through the misty clouds, natural lighting effects for the timeless man, stepping from his flat, wandering around on the grassy knoll. Peering over garden fences and through windows, getting down on hands and knees and trying to look like a property surveyor. I can hear the phones going now - for the large frowning chap leaning across my rose bushes sergeant!



The bins are kept in their own room in the flats with its own wooden barn door to the outside, a metal grill helping the rotting smells drift off into the damp air outside. The insects had built their lives around this place where I hold my nose and trundle my bin out slamming the doors and breaking several webs and flattening spiders as I do so. An insect lays fixed to the wood, looking alive but not moving and had been there for days. Who knows how many minute living things are trapped in the gaps of those grill lattices.

Just before the rain came down the grass had been cut, the machine had come running around the sides of the hill spattering tiny particles of chopped grass, causing texture like the stuff you might buy in small plastic bags at modelling shops. It mimicked the splashing of water, rotting into the ground or being blown away.