Hello and Welcome

My name is Debbie; I’m a multi-disciplinary visual artist working on and around Morecambe Bay in the UK.

My artistic practice is concerned with understanding, recording, and translating direct experiences of the landscape and places that surround my home. I have always spent as much time as possible walking in the outdoors, learning ways of communicating with my surroundings, and finding 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 as time goes by.

I have a particular interest in aspects of time in relation to place; the physical relationship between the body and the environment whilst walking; and technology. Primarily working with photography, video and drawing I aim to make work that ‘embodies’ the multi-faceted experience of a place over time; rather than to create a straightforward visual representation. 

During the last year while access to resources and travel has 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.

I consider my artistic practice to be a collaboration with the landscape and an essential document of my experience there. It is an ongoing relationship; a means of inhabiting, understanding or even communicating with the world around me. 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.