The earth, locus of growth and renewal are the inspiration behind this new body of oil paintings on canvas and on wood, 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. 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 cnatural 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 