Portfolio

Michelle Hobby

 2008

The fire station in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne was decommissioned in 2005. This is my interpretation of the space and has been exhibited in Newcastle under the title Intersection. There is a book available of the exhibition at blurb.com. 

It is a photographic archive of the space in its interim state. In generating this body of photographs I have been interested in the collapsing of architectural experiences into two-dimensional documents.

In fact, the building began in the ‘flat’, as a set of architect’s plans and elevations and, until I began to make photographic modifications of these drawings, this paper-thin representation had been preserved untouched in the City archives for seventy-five years.

In April of 2008, I started to document the empty interior of the fire station in order to produce a library of coloured surfaces and textures. This process was achieved using a digital camera sensor but, without warning, the files degraded to RAW digital information resulting in the photographic abstractions at the centre of my exhibition. These are my most successful reduction so far: here the space has become nothing more than numeric values for colour and brightness.

There will be a collective project, both myself and Johnny Jetstream have combined our two different interpretations of the fire station. There are plans for an exhibition of this project in 2009 .

My project Intersection can be seen on my website.