“Funny, furious …crammed with invention”  Time Out

“energetic, funny, menacing…performed with mind-blowing skill” Islington Gazette

• Monday 19th September – Sunday 9th October 2011
• 20 Clerkenwell Green, Islington, London, EC1R 0DP

“De Freston’s paintings are confirmation that contemporary art is still able to offer a new and engaging reflection on themes that have fascinated artists for centuries.”

Sir Nicholas Serota, March 2011

Obsessed by images of humanity on the very edge of disintegration, Tom de Freston is audacious enough to convey our most haunted fears about a world struggling for survival in the twenty-first century.

Richard Cork, August 2011

• Exhibition of paintings and poems in response to Shakespeare by Tom de Freston and Kiran Millwood Hargrave
• Launch of new publication: ‘Scavengers’- paintings and poems in response to the plays of Shakespeare
• Essays by Sir Trevor Nunn and Dr. Abigail Rokison
• For public view the opening is 18:15 til 19:30 on Friday the 9th September

On the 9th of September, people are invited to the opening of the Cambridge Shakespeare Conference and unveiling of  a new collection of paintings and poems in response to the plays of Shakespeare. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, ‘Scavengers’, with twenty paintings and poems and essays on the work by Sir Trevor Nunn and Dr. Abigail Rokison.

Tom de Freston is the current Leverhulme Artist is residence at Cambridge University. His work has been praised by various figures including Sir Nicholas Serota, the Hon Rowan Williams and Richard Cork.

This exhibition is closely followed by a solo show at Frameless Gallery, Islington with Breese-Little. (19th of September-9th of October)

Scavengers is Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut collection of poems. Kiran recently graduated from Cambridge University and her work has previously appeared in ‘Ekphrasis’, ‘Aviary’ and ‘The Forest Book of Bedtime Stories’

Quotes from the catalogue

“Extraordinarily original , immediate and totally contemporary.”
Sir Trevor Nunn

“A stunning and thought provoking exhibition…an artistically rich and varied collection of paintings and poems”
Dr. Abigail Rokison

If you can’t make the opening, you can see this collection of paintings at Tom de Freston next solo show in London.

Blasted; 200 x 150 cm, oil on canvas; 2011

Skylight

The day you came in from the cold

The ice followed you

And frilled the windows

Chased down the crescent of the moon

Made snowdrops of your eyelids

So you could not see

Dover in the gloom

Not the sky light,

Blossoming across the room.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Scavengers is a collection of twenty poems and paintings by the poet Kiran Millwood Hargrave and the painter Tom de Freston. The works respond in different degrees, to the plays of Shakespeare.

This collection of paintings and poems if £8 – to buy a copy contact tasd2@cam.ac.uk

Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev… Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter… Millais, Burne-Jones, artists of every discipline have given us their ‘take’ on Shakespeare; illustrators have imagined his characters and most famous scenes, film directors have made their screen adaptations, novelists have written works loosely based on the stories of his plays, and especially in the last few decades, theatre directors have re-imagined most of the canon, finding contemporary political parallels in the tragedies, updating the histories, and using the fashion excesses of recent decades to illuminate the comedies anew. Self-styled ‘purists’ are often horrified. But having run the world’s leading Shakespeare company for nearly twenty years, I say a resounding “yes” to every experiment, every disturbance of what has become generally accepted; and however outlandish or unexpected a directorial or design ‘concept’ may be, the text of the play is still there, virgin, unsullied, waiting to be explored by the next group, and most important, by the next generation. As Prospero says, “No harm done.”

This collection of paintings by Tom de Freston, inspired by Shakespeare, and poems by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, responding to those paintings, exactly expresses my belief that personal and passionate responses to Shakespeare are invariably invigorating, exciting and necessary. How could I feel otherwise, having directed a Timon of Athens set in the gleaming plate glass world of international banking, giving way to the detritus of a car graveyard; and a Love’s Labour’s Lost as a memory play, triggered by the nightmare of a battle in the First World War; and a Merchant of Venice set in the war mongering anti-Semetic Europe of the 1930’s; and a Richard II in a contemporary England in the grip of a monarchist versus republican debate; and a… I won’t go on.

It’s clear though that I arrive at Tom’s paintings not resisting but wanting to be challenged by his personal response to plays I think I know inside out. It’s equally clear to me that Tom is what we must term a ‘post Freudian’, influenced not only by Sigmund but also by Lucian. Sigmund would be most interested in the way the paintings are frequently dream like, as in sexual and sensual dreams, and in the collision of opposites (a female mask on a sprawled nude male body, a crowned king on a toilet, a bird beaked creature having climactic intercourse with a naked woman…). And Shakespeare is himself fascinated with dreams, as we know from The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, not to mention the nightmare world of Macbeth and the sexual fantasies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But these paintings also put the human form under a merciless gaze; Tom refuses to idealise our bodies, our genitalia, our corpulence or our angularity – a gaze which implicitly acknowledges Lucian Freud’s oeuvre, in its unsentimental, unforgiving and at times baleful scrutiny. Ophelia lies naked, confined in a bathtub, rather than floating in a stream; the Macbeths slump in exhausted contemplation in a Psycho blood-spattered bathroom, Othello contemplates the murder of his erotically naked Desdemona in an intensely private situation that might instead become marital rape. Juliet lies abandoned to her sexual fantasies, naked on a shroud-draped bed in a climactic dream of her Romeo. Even Lear is naked, with his naked dead daughter, and naked expresses my belief that personal and passionate responses to Shakespeare are invariably invigorating, exciting and necessary. How could I feel otherwise, having directed a Timon of Athens set in the gleaming plate glass world of international banking, giving way to the detritus of a car graveyard; and a Love’s Labour’s Lost as a memory play, triggered by the nightmare of a battle in the First World War; and a Merchant of Venice set in the war mongering anti-Semetic Europe of the 1930’s; and a Richard II in a contemporary England in the grip of a monarchist versus republican debate; and a… I won’t go on.

It’s clear though that I arrive at Tom’s paintings not resisting but wanting to be challenged by his personal response to plays I think I know inside out. It’s equally clear to me that Tom is what we must term a ‘post Freudian’, influenced not only by Sigmund but also by Lucian. Sigmund would be most interested in the way the paintings are frequently dream like, as in sexual and sensual dreams, and in the collision of opposites (a female mask on a sprawled nude male body, a crowned king on a toilet, a bird beaked creature having climactic intercourse with a naked woman…). And Shakespeare is himself fascinated with dreams, as we know from The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, not to mention the nightmare world of Macbeth and the sexual fantasies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But these paintings also put the human form under a merciless gaze; Tom refuses to idealise our bodies, our genitalia, our corpulence or our angularity – a gaze which implicitly acknowledges Lucian Freud’s oeuvre, in its unsentimental, unforgiving and at times baleful scrutiny. Ophelia lies naked, confined in a bathtub, rather than floating in a stream; the Macbeths slump in exhausted contemplation in a Psycho blood-spattered bathroom, Othello contemplates the murder of his erotically naked Desdemona in an intensely private situation that might instead become marital rape. Juliet lies abandoned to her sexual fantasies, naked on a shroud-draped bed in a climactic dream of her Romeo. Even Lear is naked, with his naked dead daughter, and naked again exposed to the elements while his fool disappears under an umbrella. As Shakespeare concluded, the human being is a “poor bare forked animal” and Tom is determined not to let us forget this strand, not only in the ultimately pessimistic tragedy Lear, but in many of the foregoing plays. The most vividly theatrical insight in this distinctly vivid collection (for me, having recently directed King Lear) is The Blinding, a Guantanamo world, lit by a single naked bulb, creating instantly a sense of a featureless grim environment in which anonymous faceless humans can torture, disregarding all the tenets of humanity. It’s my personal conclusion that in this play, Shakespeare abandons all belief in the human species as the central part of a heavenly plan. The gods, the object of repeated appeals during the escalating cruelty, are silent and never intervene, on the side of the good, the innocent, the faithful… and by the end of the play, as they fail to prevent Cordelia’s needless death, Shakespeare seems to be saying, “there’s nothing up there”. I get exactly that feeling of bleak despair from Tom’s harrowing Lear paintings, powerful to encounter and difficult to live with.

I have been discussing my take on Tom’s take on certain Shakespeare plays, but of course the other half of this extraordinarily original exhibition is Kiran’s take on Tom’s take on Shakespeare’s take on our complex nature. The fascination lies in us comparing our own response to Tom’s images, with those of a poet who daringly free-associates and uses her own life experience without restriction. For me, having been an occasional lyricist and versifier, that comparison is a definition of why I am a director and not (nor could I ever be) a poet. Kiran’s language is immediate and totally contemporary, more Beckett than Shakespeare in its tense spare economy, but revealing a wit and clarity without which this project – at once both complementary and competitive – could not have been achieved.

My personal favourite in this collection is her take on Tom’s Midsummer Night’s Dream painting. Boxgrove is both Kiran’s own fantasy, and the Bottom as donkey sexual experience from Titania’s point of view – and against the odds, the poem manages to achieve something both highly sensual and hilarious.

This exhibition is called Scavengers, after Kiran’s poem responding to Tom’s own encounter with the last scene of King Lear. I was reminded by Tom recently that A. L. Rowse once described Shakespeare as “a magpie”. Indeed he was, a thieving magpie at that, as he borrowed his plots and characters from previously existing works. Yes, Shakespeare’s plays were, in large measure, takes on what other writers had previously created, which in our litigious age, would be very close to plagiarism. But he converted his responses into the greatest body of dramatic work ever created. In that spirit, I hope everybody experiencing these paintings and poems will scavenge through them and leave with everything they can take.

From 1968 to 1986, Sir Trevor was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, directing over thirty productions, including most of the Shakespeare canon. From 1997 to 2003, he was director of the National Theatre, where his productions included Troilus and Cressida, Oklahoma!, The Merchant of Venice, Summerfolk, My Fair Lady, The Coast of Utopia, A Streetcar Named Desire, Anything Goes, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Other theatre includes Nicholas Nickleby, Les Miserables, Arcadia, Cats, Starlight Express, Heartbreak House, The Lady From The Sea, Hamlet, Richard II, Rock n Roll, Cyrano de Bergerac, Flare Path, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

As I recall, the seeds of this project were sown in a supervision between myself and Kiran – we had almost certainly become side-tracked from matters academic. I mentioned the planned Cambridge Shakespeare Conference – ‘Shakespeare: Sources and Adaptation’, and she told me about her work with Tom, creating paintings and poems, some inspired by Renaissance literature. When the three of us began to talk in earnest it soon became clear that Tom and Kiran’s work might not only form the centre-piece of the conference in the form of an ‘Ekphrasis’ exhibition, but might also be extended into an education project – inspiring young people to create art and poetry inspired by Shakespeare’s work. Little did I imagine that these early conversations would lead to such a wealth of vivid and evocative work, or that the proposed education project would lead to Kiran and Tom being invited to run sessions at the Saatchi gallery in London on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Over the past 18 months, Kiran and Tom have worked closely to create an artistically rich and varied collection of paintings and poems. The paintings take inspiration from the production history of Shakespeare’s work – Elizabeth Siddal as Ophelia and Ian Charleson as Hamlet; scenes from the plays – The Blinding and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and some of the plays’ central themes of violence, love, lust and familial relationships. In turn, the poems take their inspiration from the rich tapestry of the paintings, spinning off in a range of directions to create something new and original, and yet intimately linked to Shakespeare’s writing.

I am absolutely thrilled that the project has succeeded in linking Shakespeare, art, poetry and education, creating works that are inspiring in themselves, and also encouraging young people to look afresh at Shakespeare’s themes, images and characters, and to use this insight in creative ways. I can think of a no more fitting setting for this exhibition than the Education faculty at Cambridge, which prizes creativity in education so highly.

Finally, I would like to thank Tom and Kiran for all their hard work in creating this stunning and thought-provoking exhibition. As the huge variety of contributions to this conference bear witness, Shakespeare’s work has inspired a rich tradition of responses in art, poetry, prose literature, drama, dance, music, cartoons, film and many other popular artistic mediums. Tom and Kiran’s work provides a further contribution to this fertile tradition, and will, I hope, inspire others to continue to draw on the plays’ complex and richly depicted characters, resonant themes, vivid images, poetic and rhetorical language, and abundant and varied performance history, to create their own original work.

Abigail began her career as a professional actor, training at LAMDA. Her acting work includes numerous roles in theatre, and, amongst other television roles, Primrose Larkin in ITV’s The Darling Buds of May. Following her PhD at Cambridge, she became a lecturer in Drama and English in the Education Faculty and Director of Studies in English and Drama at Homerton College. Her monograph, Shakespearean Verse Speaking, was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently working on a book – Shakespeare’s Children: Adaptations and Re-workings of Shakespeare for Children and Young People – to be published by Continuum in 2012.