Wholesale Tom de Freston – I Saw This

Tom de Freston (born 1983) is a British artist and writer living in Oxford. His multimedia art tackles trauma, humanity, and intimacy across paintings, films, and performance, drawing on literature, art history, and social issues. He graduated from Cambridge in 2007 and has exhibited widely since 2008. Granta published his debut nonfiction, Wreck, in 2022; a second is due in 2024. Julia and the Shark (Hachette, 2021), with his wife Kiran Millwood Hargrave, won the Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He illustrated the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of David Almond’s Skellig (2023). I Saw This arose from a collaboration with filmmaker Mark Jones and Dr Ali Souleman after an introduction in 2017. The project’s paintings and mixed-media works explore Souleman’s experiences of terrorism, displacement, and war in Syria, and how art can represent suffering and terror. A Damascus bombing in 1996 left Souleman blind, a background he shared to emphasize engaging with Syria’s realities. Motifs include disembodied mouths, hands, feet, and circles resembling eyes; in The Mirror series, ash, screws, glue, dirt, and wood are embedded into the canvas. The works feel corporeal, volcanic, visceral, and abstract, intensified by a 2020 studio fire that renewed momentum. The process centers on de Freston describing paintings to Souleman by voice and touch, with Souleman interpreting them through his own psyche, while Mark Jones documents their interactions. The three-way collaboration is embodied in close, reciprocal practices. Habda Rashid, Yasmina Floyer, and editor Matt Price contribute perspectives on real-life incorporation, child loss, and the project’s symbolism, including quotes from Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri. All three voices are present, illuminating the project. I Saw This embodies de Freston’s empathy and translates Souleman’s world of memory and metaphor into art. Binding: Paperback Pages: 192 Author: Mark Jones Imprint: Anomie Publishing