Exhibition five, Season Three: 6 December 2024 – 6 January 2025
Artist: Freya Kemp
Clothes Horse
Acrylic on Board
2024
Beginning with the inspiration of local laundromats, the paintings became driven by an inspiration in the dynamic natural world and the strange geometries of our domestic lives. ‘Clothes Horse’ is a painting that contrasts the dynamic vision of a horse with the classic clothes horse as a static frame. The clothes horse, almost insect-like, has an elusive dynamism of its own; The strange creature is assembled and disassembled, clothes swaying as you brush past.
The larger painting, of a foggy and amorphous backyard, shows an overgrown grassy field with a clothesline stretching across the space. The clothesline, like the vegetation, is ever changing and stretches and contracts through the fog. An ever rotating cycle of clothes dried, put up, taken down, different people, different clothes, weeds grow and are cut and grow and cut. Over and over, around and around, life spirals outwards.
Implied human life extends through the paintings. Domestic labour, the love of a parent or a partner or a flatmate hanging your sheets in the yard. Images of intimacy, domesticity, home, the magic of the mundane.
Freya Jean was born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau and has a persisting love for the city and the vibrant communities that live here. Graduating from Elam with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2023, they have been exploring what an art practice outside of academia looks like. Their art is embroiled in magic and wonder, in fantasy and fiction, and deeply interested in a loving view of domestic home life.