Blue Skies, Black Earth - Deirdre Frost
Exhibition launch, 30th August 4-6pm
Exhibition continues until the 27th of September.
The earth, locus of growth and renewal are the inspiration behind this new body of oil paintings on canvas and on wood. In tandem with this is a focus on the innate instinct in all living things to grow, to thrive, to flourish, to reach upward. The paintings attempt to capture the experience of living in this world- a fragmented, complicated place of growth and collapse, influenced by a multitude of opaque and complex human agendas. The paintings strive to break free, to upend their structured rootedness. Spaces of open air, can be glimpsed through geometric slabs, while plants drift free of their moorings. Many of the plants are painted in exuberant colour, a celebration of the ability of the natural world to recover and thrive, and the crucial role it can play in healing a broken humanity.
Vignettes depict scenes of captured beauty and simplicity, much like an endeavour to simplify and structure our lives and desires, while the box like structures that contain these snapshots split and crack. Oil painting on canvas rooted on the floor draws the viewer in to its dark vortex as prickly plants reach from the depths, a
visceral reminder of what is beneath our feet. Sea thrift drifting through a triptych give a sense a floating free, uprooted, adrift and floating like seeds through the air while soft bog cotton blows above collapsed slabs on a shore. These paintings contain signs of global fracturing and collapse, throughout which plants
strive ardently toward the air.
Deirdre Frost, 2025
Deirdre Frost holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design (2020) and spent part of her studies on Erasmus in the University of Art & Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is now based at Backwater Artist Studios, Cork and is represented by Kevin Kavanagh.
Solo exhibitions include Tumbling Earth (2025) Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, Big Crush (2023) Kilkenny Arts Festival, In Habitat, In Transition (2021), Studio 12 gallery space, Backwater Artists Group, and St Luke’s Crypt, Sample Studios, Claochló (2021), Joan Clancy Gallery, Waterford and Biophilia (2021), Lavit
Gallery Student of the Year Exhibition, Cork. Two person exhibitions include Civilisation Blooming/文明開
花 (2024) with Seiko Hayase at Lavit Gallery, Cork, and Translations, (2022) with Flavia Lugigan, Romania, at Nano Nagle Place, Cork, funded by MTU Valerie Gleeson Development Bursary. Recent group exhibitions include The Thread Between Us (2025) Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Magic and Loss (2024),
Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, Stories of Art (2024), Glucksman, UCC, Cork, Field Trip (2024), Backwater Artists Group show curated by Kevin Kavanagh at Lavit Gallery, Cork, Small Things Like These (2023), LHQ, County Hall, Cork, Lavit Gallery Winter Exhibition and Lavit Gallery Summer Exhibition (2023), Cork and Generation ‘22: New Irish Painting, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.
Work by Frost has been commissioned by Glucksman, UCC via project Memory of Place (2022), in collaboration with Cork City Partnership and UCC academic Denis Linehan. DCU commissioned an artwork for their main reception area at Glasnevin, through a project Your Collection, Your Choice, (2022).
Her work is also represented in the collections of the Office of Public Works and Cork City Council.
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