Untamed, on a solitary mountain

Freya Powell collaborated with Powerhouse Arts’ Ceramics team to fabricate sculptural elements of her multimedia performance “Untamed, on a solitary mountain.” In addition to these plaster pieces representing Powell’s and her sons’ hands, Powell represents the psycho-emotional landscape of the transition from postpartum to mothering through vocalizations of breath, song, and speech, as well as through video imagery. She interweaves excerpts of a poem by Sappho into a fragmented, but collective narrative.

In February 2024, Powell worked with Biata Roytburd, Katie Coughlin, and Eleni Kontos to complete the life casting in two sessions. In the first session, two of the final sculptures were cast, representing Powell’s hands with one interlocked and the other outstretched as if holding a baby. In the second session, Powell’s son joined her to create a sculpture depicting Powell’s hands holding his. After life casting, Brian Ferreira completed the finishing for the three sculptures, refining them to emphasize skin texture and sanding them for installation. All three pieces are fabricated in plaster.

Centering the voice as a medium, Freya Powell explores the connections between language, memory, myth, and history. Drawing inspiration from the genre of tragedy, her projects engage with concepts of grievability, complicity, and ambiguous loss. She creates opportunities for her audience to vicariously witness overlooked political events or ideas such as a mass grave of undocumented migrants or prevention through deterrence, the US border policy. Collaborating with actors and singers, she explores the expressive capacities of the voice to elicit empathy.

Powell has performed, screened, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally at institutions including Moma PS1, Videotage, Art in General, Queens Museum, Arts Santa Monica, and Socrates Sculpture Park, among others. She has received grants from NYSCA, Queens Council on the Arts, and NYFA. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Powell holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, a BA from Bard College, and is Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons, The New School.