Freya Gabie
Can you describe your work in three words?
Perceptive, complex, and poetic.
What got you into the arts? How did you become an artist?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing throughout my childhood, usually on something which wasn’t meant to be drawn on. Otherwise, I’d be off somewhere completely immersed in making something. When I was about six, I remember finding a stack of unused sheets of red card, and spending ages creating dozens of pairs of different shoes with it - there were fragile stilettos, slithery winklepickers, slingbacks and even lace up boots, all in my size so that I could gingerly step into them and walk around in these different creations. I think drawing and making objects has always been the most natural way for me to process, explore and understand the world around me.
You work across different media: sculpture, site-specific interventions and drawing. What drew you to drawing as a medium and how do these works relate to your practice more broadly?
For me drawing is a language, a means for connection and encounter. Drawing has the quiet power to transform or reveal, it can illustrate or encapsulate, occupying the middle ground of what is real and a more silent, unseen world. In this way drawing has become my way of taking a journey, exploring, speculating, pushing ideas around. But the most important thing that drawing offers me is the chance to stop and watch. I want to understand the world around me, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to spend as much time as I can really looking. When I draw, I’m spending time observing, considering, evaluating and trying to intimately know my subject to put it back into the world afresh. I think that connects to my other work across sculpture and interventions, which are all interruptions or invitations, asking you to look again.
What is the process behind your work?
My process is always a specific response to circumstance, which means I end up working with many different materials and approaches. I’ve collaborated with Opera singers who performed from a London coal hole under the pavement to passers-by on the street above, with financial traders and traditional clog dancers to create a new clog dance interpreting the financial trading data of Brexit. I’ve melted down a meteorite to recast it as an ordinary nail, and worked with master ropemakers to form a rope out of hundreds of thousands of glass beads in the Royal Chatham Dockyard. This way of working has led me to live and experience many different parts of the world, from an isolated farm in Iceland, an old colonial botanic garden in India, a marine research vessel traveling around Southern Africa, to living and working with communities on both sides of the US/Mexico border. I have worked with many different people in making a diverse body of works which are all born from a desire to explore our exchange with the landscapes around us.
Can you talk about subjects in your drawings? Where does your imagery come from?
The imagery always comes from what’s around me – I get fixated on certain elements of my daily environment, either because they fit in so well and speak a certain truth about the times we’re living in, or because they seem anomalous. By drawing them, I feel like I’m befriending them in some way, spending time with them and trying to understand their nuances and contradictions. In that sense, these drawings could be seen as portraits. In this series included in Canopy Collections, entitled Monuments, I’ve been spending time documenting the piles of rubbish that collect on the streets around where I’m living in central London. The Monument drawings are trying to capture the exhalation of the city – the breathing out. The rubbish is also somehow beautiful, alluring in its saturated colour and resplendent forms as it totters and slumps on the pavement – are these our city’s unsung monuments?
You’re currently artist in residence at University College London. Can you tell us about this project?
I’m making three permanent, public artworks for the new neurological research centre on Gray’s Inn Road. For this commission, I’ve approached neurological research as a form of exploration: treating the site as patient, exposing what’s hidden beneath the surface to reveal untold histories. The three works respond to the subterranean river Fleet, flowing beneath the site, conceptually positioning it alongside the mythological River Lethe, to consider water through a lens of circularity, connection and transformation. I’m working with neurologists, archaeologists and the site constructors, who all specialise in mapping concealed topographies in different ways. Each sculpture will re-establish the connection between the body and landscape: our inner bloodstreams and the rivers around us. They will also continually transform so every encounter with each artwork will be different. I’m interested in using the materiality of the works to explore, reflect and celebrate the incredible advancements in neurological research this building will bring to the world.
Who are the artists that have inspired you most?
Oh, far too many to mention! But the two who immediately come to mind are Francis Alÿs and Philip Guston. They are two very different artists in some ways, but I find their work moving in their quiet, sensitive explorations of everyday life. Both artists' work for me, share a humility, an honesty, an unflinching curiosity to explore the complex, painful vulnerabilities but also beauty and wonder of life. Crucially, neither Alÿs nor Guston seek to make a statement or answer a question in their work, rather they open a possibility for the viewer to consider something anew – they show, not tell, and that is a very special trait for me.
What interested you about joining Canopy Collections?
I really enjoyed meeting Louise and was so impressed from the start by her thoughtful, engaged and astute reflections on my work. Canopy Collections has built an extraordinary roster of talented artists which I feel honoured to be included in. They’ve created a caring and generous community where I feel I can develop my practice being both supported and stimulated.
Do you collect art from other artists? How important is it for you to live with art?
Yes, art swaps are one of the lovely things about being an artist and means that our home is filled with a variety of beautiful, engaging artworks. I have a ceramic sculpture, made for me by the artist Mark Essen, titled Freya’s Tail which toured around the UK as part of New Contemporaries before coming home to me. Equally wonderful, I have a signed drawing by Bill Viola, made for me after I met him and his family while serving them at a London hotel. I mentioned how much I loved his work The sound of a mountain under a waterfall and found my very own edition waiting for me on the table once they’d left. These are my treasures!
Any projects in the pipeline?
I’m working on a few projects at the moment. I have a solo exhibition, Cold Frame, coming up in London in the spring, in which I’ll be presenting a body of multi-disciplinary work focused on plants and the communities that live around them, made in the different landscapes and contexts I’ve worked in. I’m also developing several other projects happening a little later in the year in Exeter and London, around ideas of resource exhaustion and regeneration. Excitingly, I’ve just taken on a new studio in Central London, which I’m hoping to also use as a space to create temporary exhibitions with other artists. I hope this will be an opportunity to consider work afresh, and to create different constellations of ideas and associations within it. I’m excited to see where this leads, hopefully some exciting conversations, friendships, collaborations and explorations!