Hiraeth in Northampton:
An Exploration of Longing

An interactive exhibit by Pamela Petro
Contemporary Art at Historic Northampton, November 2013

Hiraeth (HERE-eyth) is a Welsh word with no equivalent in the English language. It refers to “the presence of absence” — a yearning for the unattainable or irretrievable that exists beyond place or time. In Hiraeth in Northampton: An Exploration of Longing, writer and artist Pamela Petro created an installation that cleaves to the heart of hiraeth, lodging it amongst the masterfully carved 18th century gravestones in Northampton’s Bridge Street Cemetery. The cemetery was established in 1662.

The interactive installation turned the presence of absence into a dialogue between centuries, the living and dead, words and images, and sentient beings and stones. Viewers were asked to have their photographs taken through a series of salvaged windows, each of which is printed with the image of an 18th century gravestone carving. Viewers were also asked to choose a line of text to hold in the photograph, taken from one of the cemetery’s epitaphs. The final collection of photos will result in an artist’s book that catalogues a conversation between previous and current residents of the city, and will serve as testimony that hiraeth is a creative conundrum: we long for the impossible—to meet the dead, to experience the past, to inhabit the same place in another time—and while we cannot overcome hiraeth literally, we push ourselves to fill its gulf with imaginative collaborations.

Pamela Petro is a writer and artist who teaches creative non-fiction at Smith College and for Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. She is the author of three works of travel literature and has written for publications from The New York Times to Granta and The Paris Review. In 2011 she was selected as a Grand Canyon Artist in Residence for her visual work with “petrographs” - environmental installations of photographs printed on stone. In 2007, as a Black Rock Arts Fellow, she printed silver gelatin photographs on the sidewalks of Northampton in her installation, Fleeting Fossils.

For more images please see www.petrographs.blogspot.com. To read more on hiraeth, visit http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/18/dreaming-in-welsh/