The Museum of Classical Archaeology, affectionately called the Cast Gallery by Classicists, is a large room on the first floor of the Classics Faculty. Inside, despite valiant efforts to colour their figurative canvas, the plaster casts of ancient marble statues, busts, and pediments still compete to stand out against the cinderblock walls. The museum’s new exhibition, Tom de Freston’s poíēsis, not only provides refreshing bursts of colour to this space, but also creates a most interesting dialogue between a collection and its host gallery.

poíēsis was first presented in London last winter to critical acclaim. Since its arrival in Cambridge, the exhibition has become even more connected to its roots and speaks loudly as a result: it is inspired by the mythology of the very cultures which the museum displays (the title derives from ancient Greek, meaning ‘to make, create’), and is also connected to de Freston’s roots as a Cambridge alumnus. The artist met his wife in Cambridge in 2008, the duly acclaimed author Kiran Millwood Hargrave, who this collection depicts lovingly, frequently faceless but bearing the swollen stomach of pregnancy.

“It is inspired by the mythology of the very cultures which the museum displays”

These portraits are the result of a period of great love and loss in the couple’s lives, as they suffered a pregnancy loss in 2020 and six subsequent miscarriages (as well as a fire in de Freston’s studio) before welcoming their child in 2023. The artist has transformed these experiences into mixed media works, with a combination of fear, grief and fiery love radiating from these portraits. There are haunting black shadows and mysterious silhouettes painted alongside the hopeful pinks and blues of gender reveals. There are mixed media textures, as if the canvas itself has stretch marks and cellulite. There’s even an incorporation of faded fragments from Millwood Hargrave’s Eurydice poems, written for the couple’s graphic-poetic exploration of the classical Orpheus myth, which was published in 2017.

The Cast Gallery is host to primarily male busts and statues, so de Freston’s work is a refreshing addition in subject matter as well as colour palette. Where there are female statues, often naked objects of desire, de Freston’s portraits stand alongside them, depicting a woman who is not an object but a creator in her own right. What I found particularly striking was how these evocative pieces are situated amongst the permanent collection. Nestled between, behind, below and above the museum’s mostly colourless casts are canvases of various sizes. Some are larger than life, just like the statues near them, but others sit in the shadows of their ancient predecessors. It is a physical investigation by the visitor. Through peering around the thigh or between the legs of a nude, colourless male statue to seek a portrait of the pregnant body of a woman in emotive colour, visitors can appreciate de Freston’s work. It is even more affecting in this new context than if this were the typical gallery experience of paintings hung in neat rows at eye level.

“The placement of the exhibition unites and juxtaposes two scenes of love and loss”

Most poignant for me was the placement of the large portrait how easy she is shucked from her skin behind the statues of the children of Niobe. Niobe is a mythical Greek figure who boasted about how many children she had to Leto, the divine mother of Apollo and Artemis. The myth tells that, as retribution and in defense of their mother’s pride, Artemis killed all Niobe’s daughters and Apollo all her sons, leaving Niobe in such a state of grief that she cried until she became stone, and wept even then. Choosing this location for de Freston’s portrait of his pregnant wife creates a new, deep layer of grief and desperation in its reception – a woman who struggled with loss after loss in her pregnancies, before finally having one child, contrasted with the dying children of a woman who, despite having many successful pregnancies, would lose them due to her hubris. The placement of the exhibition unites and juxtaposes two scenes of love and loss, demonstrating how effective curatorial decisions can be for wider bodies of work.

Tom de Freston’s newest exhibition, poíēsis, is deeply moving and thought-provoking, and its new context in the Museum of Classical Archaeology initiates cross-cultural and cross-temporal dialogues between the pieces: old and new, pale and colourful, but speaking the same language nonetheless. Embedded within the colours, textures, and shapes of de Freston’s work are years of emotion and hard work, complementing and complemented by the casts around them. It is a testament to the work of both the artist and the museum’s curatorial team. Throughout the collection, de Freston’s clear love for his wife and child speaks with the loudest voice of all.