Freytag’s work looks at the landscape from above, exploring the marks left by people moving through it over time. Running forms a central part of his process. By moving through the land, at human pace, often without a fixed route, he maps paths and patterns that shape how he understands the world. For him, life feels less like a straight line and more like an intricate map where routes overlap and eventually connect, where everywhere leads everywhere.
The Made by Land series focuses on rural Scotland and landscapes shaped by centuries of labour and change, including those transformed during the Highland Clearances. What remains are traces: roofless croft houses, broken field boundaries, faint paths, and runrigs combing the hillsides. Using archival maps and visiting these sites on foot, Freytag traces former routes and settlements, recording the marks left on the land. These quiet places speak not only of absence but of movement, as many people displaced from these areas migrated to industrial centres such as Glasgow and port towns including Leith in search of work.
Made by Sea extends this perspective to coastal and industrial landscapes. Here the focus shifts to harbours, docklands, and shorelines shaped by trade and industry. Layers of activity accumulate over time, each generation leaving its imprint, creating a dense visual record of labour, exchange, and change shaped in part by those who once left rural communities behind.
Presented at Custom Lane in Leith, itself part of the historic port infrastructure, the exhibition brings these strands together. The setting reflects the same relationship between land, sea, labour, and movement explored in Freytag’s work, linking remote landscapes with the industrial shoreline and reinforcing how places remain connected through the traces people leave behind.
Daniel Freytag, a Scottish-German abstract artist and designer, lives and works in Oban on Scotland’s Northwest coast. His art explores the landscape from above, both rural and urban, blending natural forms with human-made marks.
Daniel studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and now divides his time between running his branding studio and pursuing his art. These two disciplines often intersect, each influencing the other. This cross-pollination allows ideas to flow between the structured world of branding and the more intuitive, expressive realm of painting.