Kira Freije: sculpting the unsaid

In a slightly otherworldly corner of Greenwich besides the maw of the Blackwall Tunnel, Kira Freije’s studio is spilling over. The main space is packed with a huddle of a dozen steel figures, variously slumping against one another, sprawled across an old springless sofa, or hunched over a thick roundel of glass, pooled in a metal bucket. The figures belong to different individual pieces, yet feel magnetically bound together, like planets drawn into each other’s orbit. Nearby, a further six figures – one trailing a string of glass orbs like deflated balloons, another just a pair of legs stuffed with cloud-like Kapok – have invaded the adjoining studio, belonging to a painter, whose stool and easel are now crammed up against the wall to make way for these. Luckily, he’s away for the week.

I’m visiting Freije’s studio as she prepares for her exhibition ‘Unspeak the Chorus’ at the Hepworth Wakefield (which in 2026 will travel in a reconfigured form to Modern Art Oxford and then KINDL in Berlin) – it’s the artist’s most ambitious UK exhibition to date. “It feels like I’ve been here every day for the last three months”, she notes.

Freije was born in 1985 in London. Her surname comes from a Lebanese Grandfather: online I find etymologies including ‘relief from suffering’ and ‘little bird’. Growing up, she went to a Steiner school – one based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, which emphasised imagination and creativity in children’s education – she seems to have got very used to being ‘hands on’. When I express my fear of welding (the electric current, the heat, the sparks of angle grinder – it gives me the willies), she dismisses it with a shrug: “I have always worked with metal, even at school”. Then, as if not wanting to sound too macho, she quickly follows up: “but I kind of loathe the associations of making things with metal”. No heroics then, just taxing, often solitary work.

It took Freije a minute to find her path. She was in her early-twenties when she did her BA at the Ruskin in Oxford, and eventually moved on to London’s Royal Academy, but in between, she worked for a stint at Frieze magazine in 2013, when I, then a temp, first encountered her. It was not an instant bond. The office loved her, whilst I was insecure and lonely. I was closed and Freije – like the latticed steel armatures of the sculptures she would end up making – seemed to me radically open. 

It was when I came across the installation views of her 2017 exhibition ‘The Dark Away’ at Birmingham’s much missed project space, Recent Activity, that I realised I had to reckon with Freije again. The images – of a red glow emerging from two encased space heaters, a smoking figure lying on the ground in a boiler suit, another entombed in a missile, and, looming above it all, a standing figure, eyes closed and fingers raised, as if conducting an incantation – looked like nothing else. I was bewitched. 

I now see Freije honing themes she set up seven years ago, like the presence of artificial light, which has become an integral part of her exhibitions: through the sconces she calls ‘candleworks’, or handblown glass lamps or, in 2023, working with Matt Daw lighting studio for her show at E-Werk Luckenwalde, filtering daylight through ceiling grates, so that it fell in warm, smoky shafts. “I always want there to be light, somehow”, she says, gesturing to a scale model of the Hepworth space she’s made from card and foam. Freije will work with Daw again for ‘Unspeak the Chorus’, using 20 recessed stage lights and a wall of stainless steel panels to reflect onto the sculptures, mingling with daylight from the gallery’s permanent lightwell. “We’re using the daylight and carrying it”, Freije says.

In a sense, this idea of working with the odds and ends of the already existing runs through Freije’s practice. “I am actually very good at finding things”, she says, producing as evidence a sheet of metal once hammered onto an Elizabethan galleon, which she found mudlarking on the Thames. The studio is stuffed with leftover scavenged materials. Boxes are marked “coloured glass”, “amber beacon”, “green wired unfinished”. Scraps of gorgeous fabrics – which sometimes drape her figures or provide frames or apertures for them – come mostly from an upholsterer friend, who supplies Freije with off-cuts and discarded coverings.

Freije’s figures are composites in another sense too. Their faces, usually set in intense, rapturous or anguished expressions (some remind me of the faces found on Niccolo dell’Arca’s 15th-century terracotta Lamentation of the Dead Christ in Bologna), are made from life masks of friends, fellow artists and loved ones. Feet and hands, meanwhile, are cast from Freije’s own body. And so, each figure is a hybrid, between identities. She then sand casts these into aluminium, which produces a stony likeness. Initiated by what Freije calls “quickening” – “a very fleeting idea for a feeling or mood” – each figure is paired with its steel armature, which Freije welds by hand, from the ground upwards. The emotional grandeur of these figures emerges, that is, through a sort of tinkering. “I’m probably happiest when I am taking the handle off a coal bucket to put on a different bucket”, she reflects, “which maybe no one will notice. But it’s something about the tiny details that excites me.”

The things that “maybe no-one will notice” are what Freije seems devoted to: an almost invisible detail on an object, the momentary gesture of a hand, glimpses of quiet moments. In the catalogue for the Hepworth show, Jennifer Higgie reports Freije remembering seeing a man walking along the street with one hand held up, sheathed in a white plastic bag, a sight Higgie says “transformed the prosaic into something delicate and magical.” In the same vein, I also think of the hours Freije spends with her Labrador, Laska, whose absence from the studio Freije apologies for several times during my visit, as if I’m missing an integral part of the experience. “I do spend more time with Laska than with anyone else”, she says, stressing “it’s very unusual she’s not here.” I think about how an animal can be a constant, all seeing, unspeaking witness to our lives. And how life with an animal is made up of continuous intimate rituals like the belly rub, with  its strange sensation of bone and fur and flesh.

One sculpture-in-progress in the studio depicts a figure curled up around a dog formed of wire mesh and sheepskin.  It’s an example of the complicated sense of hardness and softness that seems to recur throughout her sculptures. When I try to express this to Freije, it’s met with a non-committal “hmm”. Talking with Freije about what her work ‘means’, means talking around ideas: like squeezing a present you’re not allowed to unwrap for a hint of what it contains. “Each one is like a painting”, she says at one point, somewhat mysteriously. There is magic in the unsaid, sometimes. 

It’s only when we talk about our shared admiration for the paintings of the late Jeffery Camp that I hit upon the key that unlocks everything for me. When Freije describes a Camp work she especially loves of “two figures looking at fireworks, over London”, I realise the whole time I’ve been looking at Freije’s work, fireworks have been in mind. Specifically, how her tableaux evoke my memories of watching firework displays as a child. The way the febrile atmosphere turned to an expectant hush, and then awe, and looking up through the bonfire smoke at the huddled people. A mass of strange lives brought together, their faces, for a moment, frozen in a blaze that lit up heaven.