Artist Q&A | Deirdre Frost and Katie O'Grady
Wednesday 17th September 2025 | 1–2pm
Join artist Deirdre Frost and curator Katie O’Grady at GOMA Gallery of Modern Art Waterford for a lunchtime Q&A about Deirdre’s practice and her most recent body of work, Blue Skies, Black Earth: a solo exhibition running from 30 August – 27 September 2025 at GOMA Waterford.
Wednesday 17th September | 1-2pm | GOMA Gallery, 6/7 Lombard Street, Waterford
All welcome! Free event, no booking required.
About the artist and curator
Deirdre Frost is a Cork-based visual artist, working from Backwater Artist Studios, and is represented by Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin. She 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.
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.
Katie O’Grady is Curator of Exhibitions + Projects at the Glucksman Art Gallery in University College Cork. The Glucksman presents a wide-ranging programme of temporary exhibitions accompanied by an extensive education programme to engage visitors of diverse interests, backgrounds and abilities. In this role she is responsible for the management of the Glucksman’s curatorial programmes and artist projects. Katie graduated with her BA in Printmaking and Contemporary Practice from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2017 and received her MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) jointly from the Glasgow School of Art and University of Glasgow in 2021.
About Blue Skies, Black Earth
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.
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Blue Skies, Black Earth is on display from 30 August – 27 September 2025 at GOMA Waterford