Part book club, part art appreciation, part practical art workshop.

Strange Bodies follows the journey that Tom de Freston and his novelist wife, Kieran Millwood Hargrave embarked upon in their desire to become parents. In 2020, the couple discovered that they were expecting twins. Their joy was to be shattered a few short weeks later when Millwood Hargrave suffered a miscarriage. The years that followed saw the loss of six further pregnancies. De Freston began to explore these losses in the studio, giving an embodied presence to the sense of grief and loss that they both experienced.

De Freston finds his feelings represented in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as told by Ovid. Orpheus, who upon rescuing Eurydice from the Underworld, only finds himself losing her again when he looks back at her on their ascent to the mortal world. For de Freston, the story gives a voice to the bond as well as the distance between the couple in their experience of grief and loss.

De Freston looks to other artists in his attempt to understand his experience and that of his wife. He mines the work of Titian, Francis Bacon, Braca Etinger and Gerhard Richter in the process trying to, articulating his feelings.

But this is not a misery memoir, it is a portrait of a couple and the love between them. As Ella Risebridge writes in her review, it is ‘a book of love that makes you see what really matters, both in art and life. Clever, tender, completely compelling.’

Join us over a glass of wine for an evening of lively discussion about art and try your hand at making a guided drawing of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon.

All materials are included, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t drawn anything since primary school and there is no obligation to have read the book in advance. Materials and a glass of wine included.