The term poíēsis derives from the ancient Greek word ποιεῖν — ‘to make’, ‘to create’ — referring to the act of bringing something into being that did not previously exist. The show follows on from a solo show of the same name at Varvara Roza gallery (2025) curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou, who adapted Titian’s title Poesie to its original Greek roots giving an emphasis to the creative process. For Tom de Freston, this concept operates simultaneously as artistic method and lived experience: an intuitive, imaginative force that binds grief, love and transformation

de Freston has long painted his wife, the award-winning novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, often in shifting literary and mythological roles which see her in the guise of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and Eurydice. These portraits form part of the couple’s long-standing multimedia collaborations across books, films, graphic novels and performance. But the works in poíēsis emerged from a period of profound personal upheaval. Following Millwood Hargrave’s pregnancy loss in 2020 and six subsequent miscarriages, the couple welcomed their daughter in 2023.

The paintings of poíēsis are at once elegiac and luminous: dreamlike visions of bodies in flux — pregnant, dissolving, resurfacing — bearing witness to loss while insisting on resilience and wonder, not least because their display in the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s Cast Gallery lays bare the absence of the pregnant body in the classical canon. The works challenge us to look beyond the traditional boundaries of the classical, to find space for the ethical and emotional stakes which are mobilised in the body as a site of vulnerability and transformation. These works do not aestheticise grief; they metabolise it, fusing biography with myth in a language that is raw, tender and fiercely contemporary. Staged within shifting architectures — grids, interiors, landscapes — where shadows, footprints and reaching hands interrupt the pictorial space, in our Gallery they recontextuliase the antique within the shifting ground of an emotional hinterland.

Access information

• The Cast Gallery is on the first floor.
• We provide step-free access via our lift. To use the lift please ask at the reception on the ground floor of the Faculty of Classics.
• Find out more about Museum Access.
• Please contact us on 01223 330402 or email museum@classics.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions or concerns about accessibility.