Standing Woman Arms Folded, 2015

Kira Freije (b. 1985)

RA Collection: Art

On free display in The Julia and Hans Rausing Hall

Kira Freije’s welded words refer to the body in a stance or an action. The sculpture comes from the series that Freije created for her final year Royal Academy Schools Show titled, A Rapid Succession of Noises That You Confuse for Danger. As well as text-based sculptures, the series includes figurative and abstract works that seem surreal or mechanical. They all refer to the human body.

Standing Woman Arms Folded was the first of these text pieces Freije made. She describes her aim for the text works as “directional, contradictory and to slam something down”. She further describes them as “explicit and confident in their sculptural form, but they are also full of contradictions. They are firmly rooted and momentary, flippant and wistful, suggestive and rigid. They are a way of making metal work with poetry”.

After Freije graduated from her BFA at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, she returned to Sussex and, as she didn’t have a studio, worked alongside the local blacksmiths. She used the skills she learnt there to weld her sculptures created at the Royal Academy Schools.

Quotes from unpublished interview with Kira Freije 2017.

Kira Freije, (b.1985, London), studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 2013-2016. This sculpture won the RA Schools Keeper's Purchase Prize in 2016.