Strange Island: Poems and Photographs From Sicily (1)

Strange Island, by first-generation Scots-Australian artist and writer Faye Wilson, is a collection of poems and photographs created during a six-week solo stay in Sicily in January 2023, shortly after her brother's death. The work was made while exploring the main island and surrounding islands on foot and by public transport-walking through cities and small towns, travelling by bus and train, and spending long hours in museums, streets, and ordinary public spaces, with a notebook and iPhone in hand.

The poems and photographs were written mostly on location, with some added to or revised in the three years that followed. Of the more than 3,000 photographs taken, a small number have been selected and edited by the artist to convey the flow of the journey and the conditions in which each poem arrived, rather than to illustrate the poems themselves.

Sicily is experienced as a living, psychic landscape shaped by the beauty, abundance, and precariousness of the land itself, and by the imprint of thousands of generations of human and animal lives that remain palpable among the living, as time collapses into this solo journey of quiet observation, mapped in image and text.