Kira Freije: river by night

Kira Freije’s 'river by night' includes new and recent sculptural work that coalesces figurative, assemblage and functional forms, and combines industrial metalworking and glass-blowing techniques.

Kira Freije lives and works in London. She employs metal, fabric, and found materials to produce materially rich sculptures that explore surreal or exaggerated narrative situations driven by empathy. river by night includes new and recent sculptural work that coalesces figurative, assemblage and functional forms, and combines industrial metalworking and glass-blowing techniques.
The exhibition brings together elements that recur in Freije’s work – the human presence, narrative fragments, evocation of time and place, and references to interior states and to the built and natural worlds.

‘river by night’ is Freije’s first solo exhibition, showing first in Scotland, where it was on show at Cample Line this Spring before travelling down to Kestle Barton, Cornwall.

The exhibition title – ‘river by night’ – offers a tentative narrative hook, alluding initially to the presence of the River Cample, just some fifteen metres from the Cample Line gallery building in Scotland, and imparting a nocturnal register, at once comforting and unnerving. The close proximity of the Helford River and in particular its subsidiary, Frenchman’s Creek to Kestle Barton, makes an echo of this theme as the show moves south to a second location at the other end of the United Kingdom.

‘river by night’ is accompanied by newly commissioned writing by Francesca Wade, who says: ‘Wandering among these enigmatic figures — shards of light glancing off their steel forms — there’s a sense of something otherworldly, something not quite decipherable about their relationships to each other, to time, and to us.’