Trained as a photographer, multidisciplinary artist Erin Frost has turned her attention in recent years to large-scale paintings that grow out of performative gestures. These works build upon a decades-long exploration of self portraiture and mark a major pivot of creative trajectory into a new painting practice.
This recentering of visual language is a process to bring physical form to the sensory. Frost’s gestural landscapes begin with large pieces of unstretched canvas unrolled on the floor of her Mexico City studio. Here, the artist finds her compositions through meditative drawing. Moving her body across the canvas and tracing the outlines of her intuitive movements, she reverberates presence into the material. Within these abstract lines, scanned for intrinsic form and pattern, color fields of oil paint map the emerging shapes, allowing layers to materialize in a multidirectional visual unfolding. These forms hold impressions of the temporal as well as the ethereal.
Only after the paintings are finished are they hung on the wall, where their fluid forms can be observed at a distance. The unstretched canvases hang like soft sculpture, heightening what Frost calls their “corporeal essence”—the way works of art are embedded with the embodied processes that produced them. By treating them more like textiles than traditional painting surfaces, Frost imbues her canvases with intimacy and vulnerability, liberating them from any trace of formality or heroism.
Self Love and Other Radical Acts: Erin Frost on the Art of Opening Up
‘Erin Frost makes work that revels in its own vulnerability. Unlike static portraiture, which often aims to capture a single iconic moment, Frost's video self-portraits are an ongoing negotiation with time. Flowers bloom and decay, their fragile beauty made more vivid by the temporality of their presence. The artist's body follows suit, in imperceptibly slow motion.’
