Displacement. Absence & Presence

An exhibition by poet Laura Fyfe and photographer Rab Fyfe

Curated by ‘Picture The Possible’

The poetry and photography for this exhibition were composed throughout the Winter of 2021/ 2022. Observing outdoor spaces and our interaction with them, the work conveys the emptiness through what we leave behind. Footprints, ghosts, shadows, ripples. Poetry acts as a displacement of that silence. A continuation of the echoes left behind by people in place.

The exhibits consider the physicality of place as contrasted with the abstractness of human thought and experience: the emotional links between place and community, the grief we feel at the necessity to absent ourselves from those activities we were once familiar and comfortable with, the joy of nature, the rediscovery of vast open spaces and the memories they inspire, and the heightening of senses as we interact with our environment.

Footprints have a direction. Echoes and ripples reach out. Our impact on the world around us does not end with our absence. The challenges of our current times have gifted us with the opportunity to interact with our local environments in a more intimate way, and many of us have discovered hitherto unfamiliar nooks in our localities. Culture and community, therefore, have simply changed direction, moved to a greater extent to our outdoor environments.

The resulting poems and images are offered with the hope that they resonate beyond the page. They suggest two different interpretations of the same settings, the interplay of the different media enhancing and contrasting each other, leaving space for the audience to develop their own response.

Laura Fyfe, poet and writer, Rab Fyfe, photographer, and Janie Meikle Bland, curator, came together through January to conceive and create this collection. The exhibition presents Laura’s poetry together with Rab’s images in an audio-visual representation of their co-created work.