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 Poíēsis series (2023–25). The works 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 Poíēsis 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 colour in an ethereal, dreamlike palette – characterised 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.
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.
160pp
Softback
265 x 215 mm / 10 3/8 x 8 1/2 in
c. 120 images
ISBN: 978-1-910221-77-8
RRP: £30 / €35 / $40
UK Release: 28 May 2026
US Release: 9 July 2026
Contributors:
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Matthew Holman
Varvara Roza
Caroline Vout
Edited by Anneka French
Designed by Joe Gilmore
Published by Anomie Publishing, in association with the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Varvara Roza Galleries, London
Distributed by Script Publisher Services and Casemate IPM
Images: © Tom de Freston. Photos: Peter Mallet.
Anneka French 