Deirdre Frost: Windows on the world

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Deirdre Frost’s multifaceted paintings, on display in her solo show “Tumbling Earth” at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin, exude an edgy, futuristic energy you’d glean from a David Lynch movie, in which teal curtains and magenta skies feel oddly familiar yet distinctly foreign. Frost, who is based in Cork, challenges us to reconsider what home might look like when the distinction between indoor and outdoor no longer held. Her world could be the one that emerged after some kind of apocalypse, in the wake of civilization, viewed furtively, perhaps from caves. 

Frost’s use of geometric form references man’s urban architectural accomplishments while maintaining a childlike sense of invention and fun. Her images, sometimes on shaped canvases as in Shift, foreground folded paper window-like boxes framing the landscape as if to record what being inside and looking out was like. Like Malvina Reynolds’ satirical song Little Boxes, which Pete Seeger popularized in 1964, their distressed, unstable quality makes mordant light of bourgeois complacency. The box sides also serve as additional surfaces on which to paint more landscape imagery, increasing the complexity of the pictures. The allusions feel playful and poignant, nodding to the urgency of creativity and invention when the world is knocked off kilter. 

Yet Frost continually wrongfoots us; in her world we are unsure. Are we observers or are we being observed? In her imaginary realm, have humans reached a point in geological history in which they are no longer dominant predators? Are humans in hiding? The theme of entrapment is palpable. It could be related to our social-media addiction and consequent inability to determine what is real and what is fantasy. One might wonder whether A Crack in the World, one of her simpler compositions, is an image of a plant or that of a reimagined floral print. Is Mirror, Mirror a jungle or a duvet cover? Such inquiries produce an eerie confusion that forces us to reconsider how we see and interpret the different parts of the compartmentalized environment Frost has created. Her work testifies to both the frustrations of subjectivity and its redemptive qualities: if a given tableau is unappealing, look at it in another way.  

Her canvases spin between human and animal viewpoints, seemingly collapsing the boundaries between species. Some blur the line between painting and living organisms, too, featuring uprooted plants and what look like clods of soil. In Black Ash, an entire root system dangles from the panel below an image of a living plant. These tactile enhancements reflect the intrusion of reality into the surreal dreamscapes Frost conjures. While her colors and cubes seem to hover on the edge of another dimension, the use of organic materials lends her work a sculptural rawness that locates us firmly and disconcertingly in the present, adding a delicate and humanistic element to a painting that is less likely to survive whatever the precarious future has in store. “Tumbling Earth” is distinguished not only by its deft execution but also by its broad reach and existential angst.

“Deirdre Frost: Tumbling Earth,” Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin 8, Ireland. Through February 8, 2025.

About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.