Tom de Freston - Poiesis

A technically ambitious series of paintings and works on paper stages grief and tenderness through unstable spaces and faceless, pregnant figures.

This new monograph, dedicated to the work of Oxford-based artist, Tom de Freston, features paintings and works on paper from his technically ambitious and visually arresting Poiesis series (2023-25).

The works gathered under Poiesis have emerged from an intensely personal passage of time. After a pregnancy loss in 2020 and six subsequent miscarriages, de Freston and his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, welcomed their daughter in 2023. de Freston's works hold the doubleness of these experiences: devastation and tenderness, fear and hope, the body as site of both loss and miraculous return. de Freston's artworks, at once mythic and raw, are elegies and odes to the grief of losing a child, the resilience of love, and the wonder of parenthood.

de Freston stages the figures that inhabit Poiesis within unstable, porous spaces: grids suggesting architecture or containment, landscapes opening onto darkness, interiors charged with memory. The central figure in many of the paintings is a pregnant woman, often faceless and turned away from the viewer, with arms reaching forward--action accompanied by afterimage. Washes of color in an ethereal, dreamlike palette--characterized by watery-white blues, vibrant purples, soft yellows, and thinned-blood pink--bloom and bleed into one another, suggesting emotional overflow, while scraped, layered textures further the processes of abstraction and emergence.

For more than sixteen years, de Freston has painted his wife. Millwood Hargrave appears as Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Eurydice; figures drawn from literature and myth yet always tethered to lived experience. These paintings are inseparable from the couple's long-standing collaborations in numerous artistic forms. Many of the Poiesis works echo uncannily with lines from Millwood Hargrave's Eurydice poems from 2014-16, composed through their collaborative multimedia work Orpheus and Eurydice. Following the publication of Strange Bodies (Granta, 2023), in which he grappled with these experiences in dialogue with other artistic figures, most notably Titian, whose Poesie paintings form a central inspiration, de Freston's work now exists in a genuinely hybrid form.

This monograph, the second published by Anomie Publishing, London, on de Freston's work (I Saw This, 2023), presents newly commissioned texts by Professor Caroline Vout and gallerist Varvara Roza, the instigators of his recent exhibitions at the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (2026) and Varvara Roza Galleries (2025) respectively. The publication has been designed by Joe Gilmore and its introductory texts are accompanied by an extended essay by art historian and writer, Matthew Holman, and an enlightening and intimate interview between de Freston and Millwood Hargrave.

Published by Anomie Publishing, London, in association with the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Varvara Roza Galleries, London.