Freya Glass
Degree: BA Painting
University: Edinburgh College of Art
Graduation Year: 2025
New Blood Art Commentary
Freya Glass creates work that foregrounds transformation. Using transient materials - coffee, dye, pastel, plaster, and found fragments, she lets processes of seepage, staining, and erosion shape the surface and presence of each piece. What first seems fragile or temporary gains a quiet gravity, as if the material itself were recording cycles of wearing away and remaking.
The restrained palette gives the works coherence, while their gestures carry the sense of something on the verge of dissolving or shifting form. These cycles echo the workings of memory and time: nothing fixed, everything passing through phases of undoing, remaking, and returning in altered guise. At once painterly and sculptural, her pieces appear as embodied residues of life’s ongoing processes - caught in the act of transformation.
Artist Statement
start, rip, cut, tie, bind, balance, drench, rinse, ring out, scratch, scrape, remove, mark, crinkle, grid, block, construct, stain, excavate, destroy, rebuild, destroy again, mend, sew, silence, meander, return, hide, rearrange, suspend, lean, knot, rub, brush, stack, topple, bend, pull-tort, shroud, expose, break, nail, bash, relocate, start again. My practice exists as a painterly and sculptural engagement with materials from the environment’s I find myself in. Fascinated by human natures addiction to destruction, my work explores this through consideration of sites of destruction. I explore the sensations these sites produce through physical action in large scale painting and abstracted constructions of found materials.
My practice at its root is a growing thing, the conversation between myself and the materials is continuous. Through a sense of play, I aim to create a conversation between the created environment and viewer which is accessible through an immersion within the created space. I am responsive to the environments I display work within and attempt to make this an equal element at play in the work. These constructions are concerned with scale, tension, and impracticality. My practice is in a constant cycle of play and failure repetitively performed without goal or conceived end. My practice has developed through a personal and emotional examination of my practical boundaries, having to work with materials I had to hand, which I am comfortable with. I have tried to reinterpret familiar everyday objects and materials with spontaneity and empathy with the belief they can take on new life through a constant practice of play and engagement.
Group Exhibitions
(2025) Graduate Show, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh
(2024) The Donkey Show, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh
Competitions, Prizes & Awards
(2025) Andrew Grant Travel & Equipment Bursary