PRESS RELEASE
FLOWERS EAST
‘To Turn Again’ 2006 Etching, Edition 15, 43 x 37.5cms
FREYA PAYNE: ‘STRANGER SONG’
9 June – 9 July 2006
Private View: Thursday 8th June 2006
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10am until 6pm, Sunday 11am until 5pm
Flowers East will present Freya Payne’s ‘Stranger Song’, an exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture that reflect on the idea of distance. Poignant and sensitively rendered portraits will coexist with a sequence of dark and emotive etchings, large wooden heads and intricate ‘anthropological’ objects. The works were conceived as a whole, and collectively offer a myriad of readings and a provocative experience of looking.
Freya’s work demands quiet contemplation and self-reflection from the viewer; we are required to question our personal feelings on identity, relationships and moral actions. This is achieved through the interaction between the images and sculptures, as Freya says herself, ‘most of the work is caught in an in-between…pairings of sculpture and painting accentuate a setting up and failing of relationships on both a literal and psychological level’. We see this most clearly in the large triptych ‘Chorus.’ A myriad of faces gaze out from the canvas, disconnected from one another, each replete with solitary expression. The ‘distance’ we can see in each protagonist is described by the artist as ‘the gulf between who we think we are and who we are, (strangers even to ourselves).’ It is this ‘gap’ between what we believe to be true and how we frame our reality that manifests itself in Freya’s work.
Born in 1968, Freya graduated from the RCA in 1995 and now lives and works in Fife, Scotland. In 1999, Freya won the Villiers David Travel Award, she was also awarded the Cuthbert 'New Young Artist' Award,
Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts in 2005.The next exhibition at Flowers East will be ‘Derek Hirst’ & Rachel Heller running from the 14th July to the 5th August 2006.
For further information, please contact Tessa Payne on 0207 920 7777, or email tessa@flowerseast.com
Flowers East
82 Kingsland Rd
London E2 8DP
www.flowerseast.com