Kira Freije Living with Katie Schwab

Lines pass and vary in strength, ordered.

Mind sets sight to read, as though words these lines.

Looking for journeys and messages and language

in formed pattern,

left right, left to right

spines and lines and paths

are fractured by the process of their making

blood red lines slit the corner sections in all four

scapes. Corners ought to be cut — just here they aren’t

they aren’t sharp corners

The purest joy is watching her eyes go wide,

focus

she expects and waits more than eagerly

8am, 6pm, 8am, 6pm, 7.55am, 5.47pm

this glass plate full of meat is placed on the

lines, reforms to the lines like flesh to spiny

carcass, momentarily forming body.

(a window is a trick effect, separating

background and foreground only by glass

like the passenger in a moving train

caught in action amongst the strangers at a

platform, twinned within a single frame

for moments)

the joy is the joy is the joy to watch her eat,

swelling with the love for animal

her gentle tongue lapping at a bowl

that Katie’s lines hold stiller as the tongue

becomes more dedicated to the task

food quietly swallowed,

interspersed with contented grunts of mass to hollow

I wonder how she feels this joy

Now she studies briefly but accurately the area, pyrex

has a noise against a tile floor but for those soft lines

there is only an indicative echo of it, nothing more.

A tiny speck of something is spotted and meticulously

cleaned, polished, not a mark grazes those lines

***

Text by Kira Freije in response to living with

‘Placemats (Lines)’ by Katie Schwab

Wood-block printed cotton dustsheets, cotton tape, thread

2016/2020

***

‘Living With’ was produced during lockdown 2020 and sought to reflect on the conditions we found ourselves in. A circular exchange of artworks was set up between artists Kira Freije, Onyeka Igwe, Maria de Lima, Nicole Morris, Alicia Reyes McNamara and Katie Schwab. Each artist was invited to exhibit in an assigned room of another artist’s home, in turn sharing images of the artworks installed in their own home alongside their response to living with this work.

‘Living With’ was the third iteration of the self-initiated project INGEST/DIGEST/EXCRETE, which was established in 2018 by Maria de Lima and
 Nicole Morris. Taking multiple formats including, exhibition, residency, publication, radio broadcast and symposium, the project considered collaboration and how a network of friendship can create spaces for shared dialogue, exchange and production. Over the past three years we have explored the home as a context for this project, which has housed the conversations, material explorations and social encounters that we have archived here.