Melanie Issaka is a master of light, form, and brazen self-discovery. In a trance-like process, Issaka folds and then holds her body in different gestures under a careful, bold balance of darkness and light. Through this contortion, she creates mesmerising photograms of shapes carved from the boundaries of her own physical negative space: her body is suspended in one time and one space, imprinted absolutely in bright and bold cyan, cerise, or crimson.

An alumna of Brighton University and later the Royal College of Art, Issaka sought out photography alongside her screen printing and letterpress printing practice, discovering comfort in the connection and repetitive processes of these media. Issaka’s most recent bodies of work include powerful, gracious family portraiture, alongside her distinctive photogram self-portraits.

Profoundly intimate, Issaka’s photograms are created in hours-long, black-out dark room meetings with, and using, herself or parts of herself: her natural hair, her fingerprints, her pressed limbs, her gesturing hands, and her ancestral fabrics. In this unique self-portraiture, Issaka creates bodily abstractions with the masterful layering of shadow, brilliant colour, and physical matter. The final forms are irreplicable: a one-to-one scale record of one life in one time. Yet, they are indistinguishable as Issaka, with each negative form speaking to the shared humanity in our bodily boundaries. Issaka’s use of a bright, halting red anonymises herself further, and agitates the viewer with associations of violence, fury, power, and devotion.