Orpheus and Eurydice; Tom de Freston and Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Beautiful readers, I have the most exciting post for you, featuring two of my absolute favourite artistic humans (who you've no doubt seen me chattering with all over social platforms and selfie-ing with at events for a while now)...

I'm so thrilled to be seeing these beauties this evening, and at the same time revisiting one of my favourite office spaces of all time, ever - Lush HQ in Soho! 

That's right, this SOLD OUT exhibit event is going to happen tonight, and you can expect more content on here about it afterwards. For now, here are all the gorgeous details... 

We'll start with the creators themselves, I think...

Tom de Freston is an artist. Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a poet, playwright and novelist. The two live together in Oxford, married last year (in 3 very different and magical ceremonies!) with the most gorgeous cat, Luna. 

Tom's practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.

(source)

Kiran's novel 'The Girl of Ink and Stars' won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2017, and her novel 'The Island at the End of Everything' was shortlisted in the most recent Costa Book Awards.

(source)

And now a quick summary of the project...

OE is a multimedia retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, combining film, painting, a graphic fiction, poetry and music. The graphic novel (Bloomsbury 2017) sees Tom de Freston and Kiran Millwood Hargrave combine image and poetry to reimagine the myth. The film (Arts Council funded) is directed by Mark Jones and Tom de Freston, with poetry by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and music by Max Barton and Jethro Cooke. It depicts Orpheus’ return from the Underworld, where he makes a series of paintings which explore his memories and grief. The paintings seen in the film, by Tom de Freston, are the culminating part of the exhibition. The multimedia exhibition combines all the elements.

(source)

A very, very interesting review... 

“There is a radical honesty about this book, one which grabs you where it hurts and pulls you in. It’s like eavesdropping on your own repressions, and just as thrilling, disturbing and compulsive. It’s also like slipping into the space between-the space between self and self; self and other; self and death; self and history; self and poverty; self and woeful, serious, inconsolable responsibility; self and atavistic, inescapable myth. That space between is where we live, if we live anywhere, and yet it is really seen or named. It is especially rarely seen or named in present-day culture and publishing, where everything is secured in advance by a marketable career, recognised expertise, established precedent. Between author and author, word and image, criticism and creativity, this book stakes out a different territory, one which corresponds with the state of tremulous and passionate mortality in which we are both most profoundly together and most tragically bereft. Amen, perhaps, is an appropriate response.”

- Professor Ewan Fernie (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK).

Past performance and exhibitions from this project include:

• A solo show at Breese Little Gallery
• 2 exhibitions/performances at 47/49 Tanner Street (the first of which was runner up at the Saboteur Awards for best one-off performance).

You can purchase this graphic-poetic exploration in book form HERE. 

And keep an eye out for future media coverage.

The show tonight at Lush's London HQ will no doubt be covered on the Lush Life social medias; here is their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!