THRESHOLDS
Elisha Enfield
Thresholds
Fire Station Creative, Dunfermline
5 September - 31 October 2025
Opening Reception:
Thursday 4 September 7-9pm
In Thresholds, Enfield presents a new body of work exploring how absence is felt, remembered, and made visible. Through elemental subjects, the paintings examine how places and objects can hold memory, carry loss, and mark transformation.
In agricultural landscapes Gathering, Gleaning and Reaping, bonfires blaze against twilight skies. These works evoke both village celebration and sacrificial ritual, capturing fire as a force of renewal, and erasure. Altered States reimagines a Texan pep-rally bonfire, referencing the 1999 Aggie collapse and its fatal consequences. Together, these works reflect the tension between communal joy and the underlying fragility.
The Geist series shifts the focus indoors. Charcoal drawings and small oil paintings depict faint flames and “ghost lights” hovering above domestic tables, often in the presence of delicate glass ornaments - collectibles reminiscent of those once cherished by the artist’s grandmothers. These objects, traditionally coded as feminine - decorative, fragile, displayed - become temporary altars. In them, personal memory and collective ritual converge. Soft glazes and diffused forms suggest a liminal state, as if the viewer has arrived just as something flickers into being - or slips away.
Anchoring the exhibition in place is a newly completed diptych, Tide and Revenant, depicting the shoreline grave of Lilias Adie, a Fife woman accused of witchcraft in 1704. One panel shows the site at low tide, the other submerged. Here, the slow movement of water replaces fire’s intensity, offering a third form of transformation: the inescapable pull of time, place, and historical silence.
Throughout, Thresholds asks how rituals, both shared and private, can carry memory across generations. What remains when the visible world changes or disappears? Which objects and practices do we hold onto, and what do they hold for us?
Rendered in oil and charcoal, these works offer a reflective, emotionally charged encounter - an invitation to cross into a space where history is felt, not just remembered.
