Freya Pocklington was born in Lancashire in 1984 and is now based in Hertfordshire. She trained at Edinburgh College of Art, where she completed a BA in Drawing and Painting, and at the University of the Arts London, where she earned an MA in Drawing. Her work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the V&A, and the Royal Scottish Academy. She has completed residencies with the National Trust, Cove Park, the Florence Trust, and Chichester Cathedral.
Recent exhibitions include the ‘The Sun and The Moon’ at the Saatchi Gallery, Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Oxford John Radcliffe Hospitals, and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize. She has also recently completed a body of work funded by the Arts Council England DYCP scheme.
Pocklington explores the emotional and physical impacts of illness through drawing, sculpture, and artists' books. Drawing becomes an act of witnessing, with paper becoming a space that believes. Her work is influenced by Rita Charon's research into narrative medicine and Dr. Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems Therapy. She layers stories to reflect complex inner states.
She also draws on her Lancashire roots, weaving together oral folklore, superstition, and ancestral lineage. Animals feature prominently in her work, evoking witches' familiars and figures from folklore while serving as metaphors for stories and experiences passed down through generations of women.
