Hiding in Plain Sight - Carolyne Mazur and Daniel Freytag

Hiding in Plain Sight invites you to consider our natural and constructed places, unseeable by the human eye, yet all around us.

The photographs of Carolyne Mazur and drawings and paintings of Daniel Freytag represent both actual and imagined locations and enable us to reflect upon the tracks we humans create as we navigate the topographies around us.

Land use in west Scotland since the 18^th century has been an often traumatising process of stark divide between landowner and tenant; in many communities, changes in the viability of rural industries, tenants’ rights and landlords’ preferences for income-sources led to the complete eradication of entire townships, often exacerbated by landowners who employed the forcible ‘clearance’ of their tenants.

Carolyne Mazur’s images were made on the hillsides of Mull and Iona; at first sight, geometric shapes project towards us from the soft, blurry vegetation, however, upon closer observation, the shape comes into focus as a dry stone wall characterised by a waviness that indicates it was built before machinery replaced manual craftsmanship.

These shapes are Fanks, enclosures built to process flocks of sheep, often constructed from re-used locally available stone, including that from previously inhabited homes, burial grounds and townships.

Only after withdrawing and re-viewing the abstracted shapes, do we start to recognise the softer tones of the underlying foundations of centuries-old human pasts.

The process undertaken by Daniel Freytag blends his practices as a runner and an artist; by repeatedly visiting places of personal significance, such as the townships of Belnahua, Inivea and Shiaba, he develops preferred routes around the topographies which generate the shapes and forms of his artworks.

The lines and shapes of his compositions invite us to activate our imaginary sense of place, where we can soar above rural forms and urban structures and wander intuitively, free from purposeful navigation and productivity, to consider our own flows of movement, and how we gradually carve pathways into the places which are important to each of us, until they become tangible in our own personal psychogeographies, whether ‘real’ or imagined.

Hiding in Plain Sight is an invitation for people to think beyond initial appearances at surface-level, and consider the clues to be found in the places which attract us, and to explore the human and geological stories which they contain, and the significances which, in turn, we give to them.

Enjoy this opportunity to pull back from our hyper-fast imposition on landscapes, and consider more ways of seeing, and how your sense-of-place emerges from the materials, light and character of the places you prefer.