Images to Live By

I have no photograph with which to illustrate this post. Last Friday afternoon, I was in the car with my partner. I’m sitting in the passenger seat. We drive down Hoddle Street and take the entrance to the Eastern Freeway off Hoddle Street. Just as we whizz at some speed around the corner to join the freeway, I glimpse what I’m sure is an Invader artwork, positioned on the wall next to the freeway entrance. My memory says purplish-blue as the main colour, perhaps with a few key tiles in red?

Invader is a French artist who makes mosaic tiles and attaches them to walls. Usually, they take the shapes of ‘space invaders’ from that proptypical video game back in the 1970s, although some of his more recent works have involved Rubik’s cube designs. The mosaic tiles are attached to street walls, and often sit quietly unnoticed by passers-by.  I don’t know when this tile was put up, but unless it’s very recent I’m pretty sure that I have driven past it a number of times without realising it was there.

If I ever get up the nerve to walk round the corner of the freeway entrance and take its photograph I will certainly post it. Or perhaps, in summer, I could get up at first light – when that road might be free of cars – and photograph it then.

But I also like the idea that it is hard to photograph, so that it exists in my memory rather than as a thumbnail on my computer. In my memory, it has the shimmer of sudden colour against concrete, as the car sweeps past – an image appearing out of the stone.