Burping babies, TV dinners, dirty slippers

Like so many British kids, Scarlett Carlos Clarke grew up eating her dinner in front of the TV every night. “I still do,” the artist and daughter of the late Irish photographer Bob Carlos Clarke says, speaking over the phone from her home in the countryside near Dover, where she lives with partner and artist Tim Noble and their two boys, four and six. “I always watched quite intense films even as a young kid; my mum told me that I was into Das Boot, which is a German submarine war film that’s two and a half hours long. I should rewatch it but it sounds quite claustrophobic – long bouts of nothing really happening and then extreme fighting.”

These evenings spent before the blue glow of the telly, lost in the world of film, have shaped Carlos Clarke’s practice in more ways than one. Blending cinematic terror with the pacifying escape of screens, her new book The Smell of Calpol on Warm Summer’s Night presents an unsettling portrait of motherhood and British suburbia. Framed within wide-angled vignettes of domestic dread, Carlos Clarke’s characters melt into lumpy couches, gaze over pregnant bellies into fridges and sweat in the clammy heat of dimly-lit living rooms as their toddlers scream or sleep. The hazy lethargy of these scenes is offset by a crushing weight: what should feel comforting becomes cloying, and safety itself becomes a kind of suffocation.

The images were first shown in the artist’s debut exhibition of the same name at Cob Gallery in 2021. “I wanted to change the whole space to feel like you were stepping into that world,” she says of the show, where a nostalgic brown carpet covered the gallery floors and a candle that smelled like Calpol filled the space with a sickly-sweet scent. Inside, a bust of Carlos Clarke made when she was pregnant with her second son lactated endlessly, while the woozy 1968 song Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells played into an empty, smashed-up living room. Printed by south London independent publisher Mörel this July, the new book takes after the sensory hell of the show and is bound in a sheeny purple-brown material that resembles a TV screen fuzzing out.

The artist took the first photograph back in 2017 – an eerie self-portrait with her son – never intending it to be a series let alone the years-long project it became. Taking on new meaning during the years of Covid, it was initially inspired by long walks with her newborn during winter, gazing through people’s windows and wondering about their lives. “I had just had my son, I was definitely searching for some kind of stability and order,” she says. “I think I had to do this project as a way to take control of something.”

Captured in eight scenes, the lonely mothers in the book are enacted by Carlos Clarke’s friends. Photographer Nadia Lee Cohen happily strapped on a fake baby bump for the project, while her best friend Roxy is captured naked on a pink leather armchair, smoking and nursing an Irn-Bru. Working with friends in a slow and methodical approach afforded Carlos Clarke time to create her particular vision, where everyday appliances cast an epic painterly light across floor-to-ceiling panoramas. “Scale was really important,” she says of the images, which play with the sensation of being contained. “When I shot the work, I was imagining it being life-sized. Something that you got sucked into.”

The resulting images marry the unnerving domestic intimacy of Jo Ann Callis with the melancholic humour of Larry Sultan’s portraits of his parents in suburban California. “I guess with this work I was trying to force people into a space that feels uncomfortable or awkward,” she explains. “That’s what I want to happen to me when I look at other people’s work too: I want to be confronted by something.” Nick Waplington, a hero of Carlos Clarke’s who wrote the exhibition text back in 2021, compares the images to the lonely paintings of Edward Hopper and the “preening, fleshy mother-goddesses” of François Boucher.

For Carlos Clarke, these parallels are incidental rather than conscious. She notes Waplington’s seminal Living Room book as her only deliberate reference. Republished last year by Aperture using unseen images, it presents a warm, messy document of families living on the Broxtowe housing estate in Nottingham in the 1990s. “I’m obsessed with Nick’s work,” she says. “There’s a wide image in his book of a woman burping a baby, the milk is spilling out onto the floor and she’s wearing these massive bunny slippers. I stole the dirty slippers [worn by Nadia Lee Cohen] from that. I just love the whole energy and atmosphere of the book.”

Unlike Waplington however, Carlos Clarke’s pictures are shot from a distinctly feminine vantage point, one where the responsibilities of motherhood suggest a sacrifice of self. “I do think that you completely lose your identity for a bit,” she continues. “There is a sense of alienation, repetition and boredom that I think every new parent experiences that has subconsciously fed into making these pictures.”

While this project is centred around the complex subject of family, the artist doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. “I know I wouldn’t have made these pictures if it wasn’t for having kids, but at the same time, I’ve made work that has no direct correlation to anything going on in my life,“ she says, adding that the work was just as much about mastering a photographic technique rooted in the world of cinema. In 2024, she’s at last putting this obsession into practice by writing a short film that will soon go into production. “It’s really unknown for me,” she says. “But I’m used to being patient.”