Kate Frew

Species plotted from vantage point and stretched across Site Map

Kate is an architectural designer based in London. Her interests lie at the intersection between physical and digital and contradictory means of indulgence and resistance. Her first year project investigated the unseen mechanics behind digital imagery, using techniques of miscalibration as a methodology for intervention. This year, her work has focused on the romanticised aesthetics of Nature and the ways in which this can be deconstructed.

Prior to joining the RCA, Kate completed her Bachelors at Manchester School of Architecture.

Sublime Dislocation looks to resist the image of a perfect Nature. The project investigates the mourning of a long-extinct notion of Nature as distinct from human. In its place, technological wilds (digital representations, nature documentaries and VR simulations) maintain the paramnesia. As we adjust to the reality that there can be no Nature untouched by human action, the project challenges the notion of remote, unspoiled beauty through the contradictions involved in its creation. Constructing a view that operates as a terminal, boundaries are governed by sight-lines and areas of occupation and planting distinguished by pixel demarcation. The site becomes an image-landscape of choreographed interference, whereby maintaining the view determines all activity contained within it.

Boundaries and inhabitation.

As wildflowers bloom in the meadow, paths are carved out between grasses, maintaining enough coverage so as not to disrupt the legibility of the composition from afar.

In the further reaches of the station scape, a trope of the wilderness experience (the John Muir cabin), sits nestled within three pixels of Eastern White Pine.

To compensate for a perceived loss of connection to nature, Windowswap provides an online alternative. Thousands of randomly-generated gardens can be accessed through the computer screen. For half an hour I kept a window to Jeanne’s garden 'open' and began to rebuild a reality which was remote from my own.

Projecting the image onto its host landscape converts its pixels to real-life areas of measurement. Similarly, a leaf of the Cherry Laurel photographed from a distance of 135m is composed of just 69 pixels through the eyes of the camera.

Plan of 'Fruit and Flowers' room with site photograph

Kate Frew

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Royal College of Art