CORNWALL.- Kestle Barton is opening the exhibition 'river by night' by Kira Freije this Sunday, 18th of June, which will be on view until September 3rd. 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 in Scotland, where it is on show at Cample Line this spring before travelling down to Kestle Barton for our public opening on Sunday 18 June. As we usually have openings on a Saturday, it is worth noting that this one is taking place on a Sunday instead - and it is Father’s Day too.

... if these are angels among us in the gallery, I like to think of them as benign presences, perhaps not averse to apocalyptic thinking, yet ready also to extend a comforting arm and offer a beacon of solace, like a drop of glowing amber in the hazy distance, lighting the weary traveller’s way home. -Francesca Wade, 2023

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.’

Kira Freije (b 1985, London) lives and works in London. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford (2008-2011) and the Royal Academy Schools, graduating in 2016. After graduating from the Ruskin, Freije worked with local blacksmiths in Sussex, acquiring the metalwork skills such as cold forming and sand casting that have informed her subsequent work.

Recent exhibitions include: 'river by night', Cample Line Scotland March-June, 2023; The Throat is a Threaded Melody, at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Germany, April-July 2023. Her work is also included in Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Feb-May 2023, curated by Jes Fernie. Meteorites, the approach, London (2022); Soft Opening, London (2019); Turf Projects, London (2018); 12 Mackintosh Lane, London (2018).

Recent group exhibitions include: To the River, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2020); Via dell’Inferno, Herald St at Galleria Spazia, Bologna, Italy (2020); Far Back Must Go Who Wants to Do A Big Jump, ChertLüdde, Berlin (2019); Birmingham (2017); Occidental Temporary, Paris (2016) and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2016).