Hello and Welcome

My name is Debbie, I’m a visual artist living and working on Morecambe Bay in the UK.

My artistic practice is concerned with understanding, recording, and translating direct experiences of the landscape and places that I visit and inhabit from day-to-day. For as far back as I can remember I have spent as much time as possible walking in the outdoors, learning ways of communicating with my surroundings, and searching for meaning within them. These are not passing visits. I return repeatedly to the same locations; often places I have known since childhood. There is a reassuring repetition in this process, yet the experience is varied and continues to evoke an increasing sense of wonder.

Photography, drawing and painting have been my primary focus for several years, but as part of a natural progression within the work I have recently begun to experiment with video. I have a particular interest in aspects of time and duration in relation to place and spend as much time out in the field as possible. During the last year while access to resources, studio and travel have been limited, I have largely been working ‘out of my pocket’ using a small notebook, camera and mobile phone. Rather than being restrictive, this opened up some new pathways in the work, and provided more freedom to explore and inhabit the vast, ever-changing intertidal mudflats and marshland right on my doorstep.

The work is very much a collaboration with the landscape and I am engaging with it as an active participant. It is important to me that this attitude is embedded in everything I make and do, whether in the studio or out and about in the wider world.