Edinburgh is showing Held down by the wind, the first solo exhibition by emerging artist Freya Glass. Having gained her BA in Painting at Edinburgh College of Art this year, Freya has received of the Andrew Grant Travel and Equipment Bursary, has been nominated for the New Blood Emerging Art Prize and gained selection for RSA’s New Contemporaries 2026. 

The exhibition explores the ways in which destruction and play shape our perceived experience of space, combining painting and sculpture and engaging with familiar, found and collected materials like wood, stones or robes. 

Through a playful and intuitive processes, she interrogates the human response to sites of destruction as they fluctuate. Her practice mirrors this through a repetitive reshaping of her materials. Each piece emerges from an ongoing dialogue between herself, the materials, and the environment, responsive to scale, tension, and the contradictions of practicality, challenging a formulaic methods and reinterpreting everyday materials with empathy and spontaneity, inviting viewers into spaces that encourage, in the gallery’s words ‘a navigation of instability’.

With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for her assistance with this post.