Secret Garden

source: debbielawson

Work: Debbie Lawson was born in Dundee and lives and works in London.
She graduated from Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Solo shows include Nine Trades of Dundee: Our House at the McManus Galleries, Dundee, supported by the Scottish Arts Council; Living Rooms at Nordisk Kunst Plattform, Norway, supported by the British Council; Dysfuncadelia at Nettie Horn, London; and Chairway To Heaven at The Economist Plaza, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society.
She recently completed two permanent artworks for Town Hall Hotel, London, co-commissioned and curated by Arts Admin, and her work is held in the collections of Charles Saatchi, Mario Testino, the House of Lords, Nottingham Castle Museum, the University of the Arts London and the University of Dundee.
Recent shows include Make Believe: Re-imagining History and Landscape at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (with Alan Kane, Susan Collis and others), Ha Ha Road at Oriel Mostyn (with Pipilotti Rist, Rodney Graham, Ceal Floyer and others) and Contemporary Eye: Crossovers (with Jeff Koons, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry and others) at Pallant House Gallery.
Debbie Lawson is the winner of the 2013 JD Fergusson Award. Her solo show, Magic Carpet, is at the Fergusson Gallery, Perth, Scotland, until 15 March 2014.
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source: thebricklanegallery

Debbie Lawson makes sculptures and inlaid panels depicting conflict and seduction. There is a sense of domestic psychodrama in her sculptures, where often disparate household objects collide with each other or explode, creating a sort of animated hybrid that has a quietly sinister inner life and aspirations to be bigger than itself. Often using wolves or copulating couples as protagonists, her panels resemble episodes in a picaresque tale, exploring the psychological landscape of the domestic interior as they gradually unfold to reveal strange truths about the world through a series of misadventures.

Sometimes the weird psychological landscapes that emerge in dreams and nightmares assert themselves into daily life when you least expect them. The results can be quite surprising – or unnerving. A panelled wall can turn into a forest of roaming wolves or the pages of a banal sex manual; a wooden table into a reluctant mechanical toy; a roll of lino into a relentless tundra; a Persian carpet into a blood-splattered domestic catastrophe.

Merged with the stuff that surround us, popular narratives and personal histories and are intertwined so that the imaginary and material reality seem inseparable.

Debbie Lawson started by making kinetic and large-scale sculpture, warping ordinary furniture into different shapes or giving it a dramatic other life according to what she saw as its own particular aspirational quality. Then, as now, she was interested in found furniture, household objects, rooms and furnishings that were tinged with the quiet melodrama or melancholy of suburban family life.

In past few years she has made an occasional table collapse and rebuild itself as if by magic when a person walks by; a flock of books fly overhead, a row of fancy chairs do the can-can and a nest of tables grow into the size of a room so you could walk through the legs. More recently, she has been inlaying marquetry images into specially veneered wooden boards or random offcuts of plywood, subverting the images of a traditional craft to create scenes of conflict and seduction.

Debbie Lawson graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2004. She was born in Dundee and now lives and works in London.