About the artist
"I’m interested in exploring nature vs synthetic perfection and our need to organise everything into neat, modular systems."
Lorna Freytag is a mixed media artist based in Oban on the north west coast of Scotland. Originally from Edinburgh Lorna studied at Gray’s School of Art and her work has taken her to New York, Sydney, Dubai and London.
She is interested in nature versus synthetic perfection, using natural materials and pressed flowers to create structured, grid-like artworks that explore systems of control, colour and repetition.
Working across modular canvases, oversprayed works, and flag-based forms, she examines how nature is categorised, standardised and visually organised. Colour plays a central role in her work often referencing industrial palettes, swatches, signal systems and methods of classification.
The work moves between slow, traditional flower pressing and the faster, more forceful acts of overspraying colour or organising the panels into controlled grids and shapes.
Artist Statement / Colour & Contradiction
This new body of work explores the tension between natural beauty and our desire to control, categorise, and preserve it. Using pressed flowers alongside synthetic materials and paint, the work questions what happens when something fleeting is pushed towards permanence and perfection.
Each artwork is modular, so they can stand alone, in pairs, or in larger groupings. Together, the panels begin to resemble colour charts, swatches, or grids — visual systems that humans have historically used to organise and simplify the natural world.
Within each group, at least one panel has a small section of untouched pressed flowers. These areas continue to change slowly over time, while the surrounding panels — oversprayed with acrylic paint — remain visually fixed, holding a kind of colour memory rather than colour truth or sometimes obliterating colour altogether with white or black.
By overspraying the flowers with layers of paint, the work becomes almost like a recipe for synthesising nature — a mixture of the real and the manufactured. The repetition and flat colour reference industrial processes, while the flowers themselves resist full control through their texture, irregularity, and gradual change.
Ultimately, the work exposes our fixation on permanence, uniformity and the artificial reproduction of the natural world. But it also invites you to enjoy the colour and structure, whilst taking time to notice what’s real beneath the surface.