Pile Up
Louise Ashcroft / Freya Gabie, commissioned by
Art Work Exeter
Exeter Custom House, 2025
A series of commissioned artworks by Freya Gabie, which conceptually and sculpturally address ideas of imbalance and worth.
They approach Exeter Custom House's role in the systems of commerce within the British Empire, reflecting how historic practices persist in impacting how value is attributed in western society today.
The work uses material aspects of our environment that are consciously overlooked or edited out – wastewater, weeds, used plastic - to speak about different forms of worth.
They also playfully address the circularity of stuff, highlighting that what is considered ‘waste’ or ‘resource’ is all matter, what changes is our own relationship with this material as we shift it out of place.
“Don’t let them see the whites of your eyes”
Historic weights from Exeter Custom House arranged as a counterpart to discarded waste found around Exeter.
Mineral Sands
Mineral Sands unites earth from over 9,000 miles apart into a small sculpture that also becomes a new sample of ‘global’ land. South African soil, collected by the artist, has joined spoil from strip mines in KwaZulu-Natal, and leachate cleaned from the roads around Exeter, UK.
This detritus contains traces of platinum, palladium and rhodium, extremely rare metals that are among the most valuable materials on earth. Predominantly mined in South Africa and shipped globally, they end up as a waste product on our streets, shed from catalytic converters.
If it was possible to reclaim these metals from this leachate, this pollutive waste would become radically more valuable. The work takes its title from the name given to natural deposits of economically important heavy minerals, such as platinum, usually found in coastal areas, that are mined and traded globally.
​
​
Balance / Ballast
Pencil drawings suspended with historic weighing artefacts from Exeter Custom House
The installation Balance/Ballast takes over the Surveyor’s Office to consider the Custom House’s role through the British Empire as a gatekeeper for the city’s flow of goods, feeding vast global currents of extraction and trade.
Post Empire, these systems quietly persist, shaping how value is attributed to our material world in Western society today. Overlooked by the 1832 board of tariffs, tentative installations contrast Imperial measuring tools and ‘waste’ materials with Akan gold weights, Abrammuo; small cast-brass figurines used to measure gold dust, which was both a valuable commodity and currency for the Ashanti people of what is now Ghana, West Africa.
These weights go beyond financial regulatory function in their physical representation of societal ideals, through depictions of the varied proverbs associated with the Akan culture. Each financial transaction would have been directed by a weight that also provided a form of storytelling, moral education and social commentary; an ethical value system running concurrent with a monetary one.
In 1901, after crushing Ashanti resistance, the British formally annexed this territory, declaring it the Gold Coast Colony. It remained under British rule until Ghana’s independence in 1957. In this period, coin currency was introduced, rendering these weights obsolete. The Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter holds a fantastic collection of these artefacts, some of which are currently on display.
Constellation
Materials: Paper recycling, reassembled and redacted by the artist.
Constellation gathers an ensemble of different paper collected from the Material Reclamation Facility in Exeter, that has been carefully redacted: utility bills, shopping lists, photographs, completed crosswords, love-letters and junk mail.
Shoddy
​
Sump Room, Exeter Custom House
An installation created with reclaimed plastic textile, collected from British industry and formed into a precarious structure, that may or may not last throughout the exhibition period.
Exeter played a significant role in the British wool trade, an important and valuable export for many centuries. Today, wool has been replaced in many of its former uses by cheaper plastic material.
The word shoddy originally referred to recycled wool, a material first manufactured in the UK during the early 1800s - a new industry creating a significant demand for old textiles and waste wool.
Over time, the word's usage has evolved to become associated with cheapness and poor quality. This transition is attributed to manufacturers reportedly supplying troops in the American Civil War with uniforms made from low-quality shoddy fabric that quickly deteriorated.
Thicket
Discarded luxury brand shopping bags collected from streets around the UK.
These bags, though discarded packaging, retain a commercial resale value. They have been altered in reaction to the ‘bioindicator’ plants found around Exeter quayside. By growing here, these species (commonly disregarded as weeds) indicate contaminants in the soil built up through ground disturbance/extraction and industry. The plants in Thicket include Common Nettle, Cow Parsley, Sea Thrift, Blue Fleabane, Gorse and Old Man's Beard, which indicate substances such as phosphate, nitrogen, calcium, sand, lead and coal.
​
​
With special thanks to Art Work Exeter, Paula Crutchlow, Stuart Crewes and Volkhart Müller. Matt Hulland and the team at Exeter City Council’s MRF, Lucy Mottram and the team at Recycle Devon. Tony Eccles - Curator of Ethnography at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Caroline at English Fibres and Yarns LTD, Paul Lister Smith - Botanist and senior lecturer at Bristol University, Benjamina Efua Dadzie - Collections Assistant in Anthropology, Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University Museums. Johanna Korndorfer Dave Adcock and the team at Exeter Custom House.