The Earth, locus of growth and renewal, is the inspiration behind this new body of oil paintings on canvas and on wood by Deirdre Frost.

The works consider rootedness and displacement, alongside 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. Buildings, split open under construction or under dereliction, reverberate of our time of great need for safe homes globally. A space to thrive; a world where the plants and soil itself is under pressure due to excess human activity.

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.

In line with works such as Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, which presents our blue world spinning serenely through black space as we live out our small and larger dramas, this body of work flips our perspective. Created from the ground, and drawing on local imagery of the natural and built environments, these paintings unfold against the constant bombardment and diversion of news and social media. Within them are traces of global fracturing and collapse, through which plants continue to reach toward the air.

Deirdre Frost is a Cork-based visual artist, working from Backwater Artist Studios, and is represented by Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin.

Her solo exhibitions include Tumbling Earth (2025) at Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; Big Crush (2023) at Kilkenny Arts Festival; In Habitat, In Transition (2021) at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, and St Luke’s Crypt, Sample Studios; Claochló (2021) at Joan Clancy Gallery, Waterford; and Biophilia (2021), part of the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year Exhibition, Cork.