Freya Gabie: Hold the Line

About

On Wednesday 24 and Saturday 27 October artist Freya Gabie will present a talk focusing on her recent voyage on the Dr Fridtjof Nansen Vessel, where she was invited onto the Namibian and South African Pelagic cruise November – December 2017. Gabie’s recent research focuses on Norwegian arctic explorer and marine biologist Fridtjof Nansen, who in 1922 as High Commissioner for Refugees within The League of Nations, issued a historic document offering stateless persons travel and asylum outside of their home country. By 1942, the passport was recognised by 52 countries, 53 by today’s borders. Gabie has spent the last two years tracing these documents and has uncovered over seventy passports. She is working towards recreating a voyage taken by one of these passport holders in 2019.

On display in the gallery will be a collection of postcards Gabie sent to contacts across the world throughout her journey, her Atlas drawing, as well as an ongoing series of drawings of military explosions based on results generated by Google image search.

Freya Gabie studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and the RCA, she works between Bristol and London. Her practice is site responsive: focusing on connection and exchange. She makes objects, drawings and interventions that respond to histories, stories and places, peeling under the surface to expose hidden layers. Her work disrupts 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 range of individuals and communities in the UK and internationally. Previous projects include staging a live performance with an Opera singer in a coal-hole in central London and collaborating with UK financial traders and traditional Lancashire clog dancers to create a clog dance interpreting the financial trading data of BREXIT.

This spring Gabie was commissioned by Bow Arts as artist in residence for Raw Materials Textiles 2018 to create a body of work responding to the historic textile of East London, working with several archives and museums including the V&A, William Morris Gallery and the Jewish Museum. This summer, for Diep Haven 2018, she created a sculptural intervention in the form of a line drawing across two landscapes, in Normandy France, and East Sussex, UK along the proposed V2 missile route. She has just returned from a one-month residency in Tranas, Sweden where she developed body of work in response to the town’s historic fur trade.