Deirdre Frost, Haven, 2024 Oil, acrylic and mixed media on panel, 122 x 140.5 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

9th January 2025 @ 6:00pm – Exhibition

Exhibition: Deirdre Frost | Tumbling Earth

To launch our 2025 programme, the Gallery is pleased to present Tumbling Earth, a solo exhibition of new works by Deirdre Frost.

Earth, painted black, textured and dense, contains root fragments, its blackness implying underground dark depths, boundless and deep – profundis.

The man-made structures on top of this soil, together with the plants that grow from it, speak to our relationship to land, to the soil and to how it is ‘owned’, used and fought for globally.

This new body of paintings by Deirdre Frost, features parts of buildings and plants in the artist’s local environment. The buildings are non-hierarchical, have been reduced to their essential shapes and taken apart – in places lying as rubble – at other times reminiscent of toy-like wooden architectural maquettes. Their simplicity of shape and the familiar plant forms that burst forth are elements that would be recognisable at any time in modern history.

While the paintings are composed of everyday elements, the work is embedded in a time of great global instability and crisis. The human figure does not appear within these paintings, but there are traces of the individual human experience everywhere in the work, and of life witnessed and experienced on a daily basis. Paintings of nettles are imbued with colour and vibrancy – each colour and brush stroke as unique as each leaf that grows in nature, influenced by its local environment and conditions. There is a playfulness, and reassembly of the basic subject matter within the paintings. The forms the buildings take in the work are not representative of how they appear locally, but are opened up, taken apart, toppled and cracked.

FROM

9th January 2025
—8th February 2025

More

On Thursday January 23rd from 6:30 – 7:30pm, the gallery will host a live musical performance of In Habitat, In Transition (12:45) by Paul Frost, and performed by Mia Cooper (violin). Michael Buckley (saxophone) will then perform his interpretation of the idea of Tumbling Earth on saxophone.

In Habitat, In Transition (12:45) for solo violin was composed by Paul Frost to accompany a two-venue solo exhibition of the same title by Deirdre Frost in 2021. The musical composition is based on themes within the artworks, and is broken into six sections – a River theme that returns twice in modified form; Blackbird; Seasonal Cycle, and Urban Cycle. During a time of pandemic, this piece was prerecorded in order to accompany the exhibition by Mia Cooper (violin).