The Divine Chorus of Kira Freije

According to most dictionaries, the word ‘unspeak’ – meaning to recant or unsay – is now largely obsolete. It exists in another time and place, and so it is hard to pin down, impossible to know fully. 

This sentiment is echoed in Kira Freije’s latest exhibition, ‘Unspeak the Chorus’, at the Hepworth Wakefield. The show takes its name from a 2023 work in which two figures hold a piece of fabric, seemingly ready to catch something from above. The relationship between the artist’s past and present work, therefore, feels conscious, like a call and response, a gathering and bringing forward of forms and ideas.

The single-room exhibition comprises 20 life-size steel and aluminium human figures accompanied by animals, buckets and balloons, arranged in intimate but disparate groupings. The aluminium hands and feet of the figures are cast from the artist’s own body, whereas the faces belong to important people in her life. Light is a consistent and central component of Freije’s work. Lamps feature throughout, including 20 recessed stage lights alongside stainless-steel panels, installed along a custom-made wall, designed to reflect and illuminate the assembled chorus of figures.

Despite there being no prescribed route – the artist tells me the exhibition was installed ‘very intuitively’ – it feels natural to begin with The Calm Endurance of Grief (all works 2025). Here, a figure teeters on a hollowed-out stool, fixated on the icy metallic trough below. Another figure kneels and clasps onto their leg, their eyes closed in meditation, as their face delicately rests on their side. Positioned by a large window, natural light pours in diagonally from the outside world, enveloping the work in a celestial glow akin to a Fra Angelico painting, its effect intensified by the dramatic haze from a nearby smoke machine.

Throughout the space, the chorus embodies wild contradictions. They possess a remarkable tension, notable in the pointed foot and gaping mouth of one figure in Breath That Must. At the same time, the companion figure in this piece leans forward in a tender embrace, harbouring an incredible lightness – a weightlessness even – as pacifying as a familiar scent or a well-worn chair. Proximity is also skilfully manipulated as distances between works are carefully planned and measured by the artist. Again and again, faces and hands come just millimetres apart whilst narrowly avoiding contact, pushing the boundaries of material and form and what we expect from sculpture. In The Lightness, a figure lies on its side, its nose nuzzled into a sheepskin hide, eliciting a bodily, visceral reaction. Elsewhere, gestured limbs are draped with antique fabric or stuffed to the brim with kapok, as the artist playfully integrates elements of softness into rigid forms.   

Most affecting are the faces and the breadth of emotions they possess. It is human nature to try to decipher cryptic clues, yet here the oracular, contorted expressions remain impossible to read. There is a fine line between a smile and a grimace, agony and ecstasy, and here our sense of perception is forced to work overtime to make sense of it all.

Freije’s skeletal figures make you feel strangely at home in their world, wherever that may be. Diaphanous as they are – in a way more akin to silk than steel – they are able to hold space, exuding a quiet power. Who are they? What do they feel? Are we merely a voyeur in their world, or a participant, imbuing their metallic forms with human emotion and narrative? Ultimately, this sense of profound ambiguity is where their strength lies, and some things are better left unsaid. 

Kira Freije’s ‘Unspeak the Chorus’ is at the Hepworth Wakefield until 4 May 2026

^{Main image: Kira Freije, ‘Unspeak the Chorus’, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist, The Approach, London, and The Hepworth Wakefield; photograph: Lewis Ronald}