Freya McKinty aims to capture the experience of being truly present in transitional spaces – waiting rooms, lobbies, hallways – emulating the moments where boredom and curiosity drive you to really examine each element of a place. These spaces have an anonymity, designed to be inoffensive but often becoming visually bland and homogeneous by virtue of this. However, when time is consciously spent with the space, speculation as to the decisions and process behind its construction appear. She is also fascinated by spaces under construction, not only because of the abundance of found materials they provide, but because these moments are when a building is in its most skeletal form and has the potential to develop into something unknown. The façade is peeled back to expose the framework underneath, challenging its typical polish and demystifying the working behind it.

Through working in the expanded field of printmaking, transforming screen-printed fabric into physical boundaries within a space, she creates structural objects that must be negotiated and encircled to be fully appreciated. These objects are then curated into installations that viewers must navigate, traversing the space to discover the hidden features and framework that support the work – both literally, as wooden supports, and as provisional work that functions as concept sketches or partial blueprints.

McKinty’s process is underpinned by iterations and repurposing, as she constantly revisits old work and holds on to discarded pieces until she finds a way to reuse them. Taking elements from both original material and found compositions, then deconstructing them and reconfiguring these fragments to form new structures – allows her to create new spaces that carry echoes of their past lives, making them vaguely familiar but with disorientating alterations. Lo-fi printmaking techniques, such as collagraphs made from recycled packaging, continue this sustainable thread and mirror the legacy of architecture, as the matrix degrades and erodes through use and eventually becomes too mangled to print from – similar to how spaces
become defunct and unfit for use over time.