Kira Freije’s river by night is installed across our upstairs and entrance spaces, the exhibition includes new and recent sculptural work that coalesces figurative, assemblage and functional forms, and combines industrial metalworking and glass-blowing techniques.

river by night 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 – which take on a distinct charge in relation to Cample’s domestic scale and rural setting. A pair of figures entitled fireworks stand together as if looking out of a window onto the greenspace below, whilst another, entitled permanence of a sacred tongue, is dropped on one knee, her head thrown back and hands raised as though in a moment of private euphoria. The exhibition title – river by night – offers a tentative narrative hook, alluding to the presence of the river Cample, just some 15 metres from the gallery building, and imparting a nocturnal register, at once comforting and unnerving. A tall streetlamp (from which the exhibition takes its title) looms like a delicate beacon, a marker of a threshold. Other works – Recognition of the world behind nightfall and Autumn dusk – equally conjure a sense of the fading day, of one thing becoming another, of the liminal state.

Kira Freije will be in conversation at Cample on Sat 13 May. river by night is her first solo exhibition in Scotland and is accompanied by newly commissioned writing by Francesca Wade. 

Supported by Creative Scotland, The Elephant Trust and The Henry Moore Foundation.

The exhibition will travel on to Kestle Barton, Cornwall, in June 2023