Throughout her career, Prunella Clough’s work focused on the detritus of the street. In Wet Street and related works like Sweetpack (1988, Colchester and Ipswich Museums) and Target (1988, Herbert Museum & Art Gallery), she created a myopic world of rich textures, muted colour and asymmetric patterning. Paying microscopic attention to the crack in a wall or a tangle of wire mesh, she created a distinctive visual language which helped her to describe these familiar urban sights. The large volume of photographs by Clough in the Tate Gallery Archive show cooling towers, construction sites and canals, and suggest the way that her visual imagination was fed by an alternative, unbeautiful aesthetic of decay and concrete. Wet Street is a delicate, even poetic example of her meticulous approach to picture-making. The surface of the paper has been intensively worked with sequential dashes and dots. These have been stacked up, layer on layer, suggesting a pitted pavement slab full of puddles or a larger landscape swept by a deluge. Clough systematically sought to abstract the formally striking patterns or shapes which she recorded in her photographs, and in Wet Street the sense of scale is deliberately ambiguous; it is unclear whether the work depicts something seen close at hand or something far off. Several of her photographs from the 1980s and 1990s depict paving slabs and patio paving, and Wet Street is the artistically refined consequence of those earlier studies.