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DUET
Duet is a body of work made while on and in response to spending
three months as artist in residence on the Mexican/U.S. border. The
exhibition explores the landscape of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez as a
repository of shared connections and experience. Giving the land
voice to both remember and carry the complications, contradictions,
and beauty of the place; the way these nuances act in harmony, and
the notes of discord they strike.
For this exhibition, Freya Gabie draws out threads that weave the
two cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso together. Approaching the
intricate back and forth of economic, social, and medical journeys
that take place between the people and objects of the border, and
examining how the border both generates the flow of goods, services,
and people and dams it, revealing the ways the resulting impacts are
felt.
The work considers the landscape the two cities share, approaching
the exploitation and exclusion of the land’s natural resources to
ask how this may echo the exploitation and exclusion created by an
international border. The exhibition also focuses on both cities’
relationship with the native flora: indigenous plants specifically
adapted to the hardness of the desert and crucial to the survival of
communities for centuries before the settlement of Paso Del Norte,
are now reframed alongside plants brought here from other places.
The work seeks to negotiate how these introductions displace,
change, and challenge the delicate environmental and social balance
of a desert region.
Freya Gabie studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and the
Royal College of Art. Her work is site responsive and she regularly
works collaboratively with individuals and communities in the UK and
abroad, from opera singers, clog dancers, and archaeologists, to
iron miners, and many people in between. She has exhibited and been
commissioned widely, both internationally and in the UK. Previous
projects include; Duet The Bar, El Paso, USA, All Fired Up a
collaborative commission with Historic England responding to the
Ceramic Industry of Stoke on Trent and Poole, Hold The Line
Journeying aboard the Dr Fridtjof Nansen vessel with the Norwegian
Institute of Marine Research down the South West coast of Africa,
Leonardo Da Vinci, A life in Drawing Bristol Museum, Palsmuseum,
Sweden, Châteaux De Bosmolet, Diep-Haven Festival France, USF Art
Centre, Norway, Neo: Bolton, 108 New York, Fljótstunga Iceland and,
Franconia Sculpture Park USA. She is currently undergoing a public
artwork commission for UCL for the new neurological research
hospital being built on Gray’s Inn Road for the IoN, DRI, and UCLH.
Freya has just returned from a residency in Bangalore, India, where
she has been responding to two historic gardens, Lalbagh Botanic
garden and Cubbon Park, towards an exhibition at Artcore, Darby, UK
in spring 2024.
Difficult Maps
Pen on paper
each 59 x 79 cm (framed)
Drawings made in EP/CJ Chamizal plants growing on the U.S./Mexican border.
This hardy desert plant gave its name to a long-running dispute caused
by a southern shift in the Rio Grande river. Every part of this plant
is used by native Tigua Indians.
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