Freya Gabie studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Her practice is site responsive: focusing on connection and exchange. She makes objects, drawings and interventions that respond to particular histories, stories and places, peeling under the surface to expose hidden layers. The work seeks to disrupt the unconscious interchange between people and their environment through methods of displacement, partial erasure or re-framing; creating a sense of isolation and impermanence while paradoxically highlighting the connection at play between seemingly autonomous entities, often left unspoken or overlooked.
She regularly works collaboratively with a wide spectrum of individuals and communities both in the UK and abroad. Previous projects include working with an Opera singer to stage a live performance in central London from a coal-hole, a group of miners in the North of England, an entire community in Tower Hamlets, London; forming a continuous day-long A-Capella performance from dawn to dusk; a ‘swansong’ to a medieval garden condemned for demolition and redevelopment. In 2016 she collaborated with UK financial traders and traditional Lancashire clog dancers to create a clog dance interpreting the financial trading data of BREXIT
Freya spent a winter on board a marine research and humanitarian aid ship travelling around coastal Africa, tracing original refugee routes of the 1920’s for an ongoing project, Hold the Line. This project which saw her retrace, 90 years later, the route of Pavel Kiprianovitch, from Bulgaria to France on foot in summer 2019 . She has been shortlisted for Artangels ‘Everywhere’ open submission, the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and The British Academy Bridget Riley Fellowship.