Join Deirdre Frost as she discusses the making of her exhibition Big Crush. This body of paintings looks at the phenomenon of desire, considering how it both consciously and subconsciously shapes the world in which we live. The work has been made in the context of a daily newsfeed reeling from Brexit, the pandemic, climate change, material and plastic waste, healthcare crisis, housing crisis and Putin’s war. The artist employs familiar everyday imagery of her local environment, including buildings and flora in vibrant colour, which she imbues with a sense of a larger world in crisis. Writer and art critic Cristín Leach has produced a three-dimensional text response to the paintings, which can be viewed in the gallery. Deirdre Frost is an artist based in Cork. Since graduation from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2020, she has had numerous solo exhibitions and awards, and her work was included in the Butler Gallery exhibition Generation 2022: New Irish Painting. Research leading to this body of work was supported by the Arts Council Agility Award 2022. Cristín Leach is an art critic and author of the critically acclaimed memoir Negative Space (2022). Her art criticism has appeared in The Sunday Times since 2003, and on RTÉ TV, radio and digital services since 1999. Her short fiction and personal essays have been published in Winter Papers and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. Her recent collection of short stories, essays and other forms of expanded art writing, From Ten till Dusk - A Portrait of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Twelve Stories, will be published by the RHA in October 2023 to coincide with the Academy's 200th anniversary.