Here, Whales are Gods

A humpback breaches across five feet of birch panel, and the sea it rises through is built entirely of stones — hundreds of rounded cells in slate, bone, ochre and pale green, each one outlined and filled by hand, so the water reads as mosaic rather than movement. Above the waterline the panel turns to gold leaf laid in broken sheets, torn at the edges and left unblended, and the whale's fluke cuts up into it. The animal itself is worked in graphite and grey-white acrylic, the only part of the painting that is not made of cells. This is the work Freda's Sanctuary collection is written around: she has said that on the boat ride to the village where her mother has gone to find sanctuary since Freda was a child, she was greeted by a breaching humpback and wept — that whales, to her, are holy. At thirty by sixty inches it is the largest piece in the collection.