In September 1969, Robert Smithson traveled to England and Wales with Nancy Holt, visiting the U.K. on the occasion of his participation in the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. During that trip he made several works, including  Mirror Displacement (Brambles) and Mirror Displacement (Grassy Slope). The Mirror Displacements are temporal sculptures that existed only briefly in the landscape before being fixed in time through photography, challenging prevailing assumptions of sculpture as static, timeless, and monumental.

Smithson would select a specific outdoor site, place a series of mirrors, photograph them, and then remove them—sometimes using the same mirrors for another work. These distributed sculptures existed only briefly in the landscape and find their material form in photographic slides. Mirror Displacement (Brambles) comprises two slides. Following Smithson’s logic of the Nonsite, the slides may be understood as a Nonsite to the Site of the artwork, while the prints function as a further displacement of the original site.