If These Walls Could Talk
In her enchanting narrative paintings, Kathryn Freeman imagines a world where people coexist with flora and fauna in moments of leisure and creativity.
In her enchanting narrative paintings, the Massachusetts-based artist Kathryn Freeman imagines a world where people coexist with flora and fauna in moments of leisure and creativity. She dissolves the boundaries that delineate indoors and outdoors, presenting the alternate reality of her ideal: Humans relent to the will of the wilderness, inviting all manner of furry and flighted friends into their homes. For her first exhibition with Carrie Haddad Gallery, If These Walls Could Talk, Freeman incorporates the figure, landscape, and domestic spaces in dreamlike tableaux.
“I always drew what I dreamed,” Freeman notes. As in the experience of a dream, where one can take the absurd in stride, the humans of Freeman’s paintings maintain a nonchalant disposition in the face of extraordinary occurrences. This notion is furthered by her use of setting, as the architecture of the living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms encourages reciprocity between humans and the natural world. In some places, exterior walls are missing entirely, allowing interior space to flow seamlessly into landscapes of verdant forests and humble mountains that are inspired by the artist’s surroundings in the Berkshires.
Enrapturing as they are, Freeman’s images function as more than spellbinding works of fiction; she poses very real questions about the disconnect between humankind and nature. “There’s the world as it is and the world as it should be,” Freeman opined. “We should be living with nature, not imposing ourselves on it; accepting it, letting it exist with us; observing it quietly, just letting it be around us.”
—Matt Moment
