Strange Bodies

STRANGE BODIES is a cycle of work developed over the last few years, and emerged in conjunction with the material Tom explores in his latest narrative non-fiction book with Granta, STRANGE BODIES, which centres on the recurrent miscarriages his wife experienced before their daughter was born last year.

These paintings explore thresholds, desire, and distance – between lovers, between painter and painting, between viewer and artwork. They are hymns to the pregnant body, worshipful, tender, awed, and estranged. They are also thresholds to Underworlds, figures displaced, emerging and vanishing into veiled, shattered spaces. The paintings are haunted by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, often laced with lines of poetry by Kiran, in the voice of Eurydice.