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My sculptures and inlaid wooden panels take viewers on a |
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Debbie Lawson’s exhibition Dysfuncadelia is on view at Nettie Horn through November 16.
Debbie Lawson, Oasis, 2007. Persian carpet and steel. Courtesy of Nettie Horn Gallery, London.My sculptures and inlaid wooden panels take viewers on a journey through the psychological landscape of the domestic interior, where the very walls and floors are charged with desire, while humdrum objects quietly smoulder in the heat of sublimated emotion.
A Persian rug erupts into a lush desert oasis; a pedestal mat attempts to transcend its abject life to become a desert island; an aspidistra is smothered under layers of patterned carpet. Some pieces collide with each other, creating an animated hybrid that has a quietly sinister inner life and aspirations to be bigger than itself. My inlaid wooden panels—often featuring wolves or copulating couples—subvert the polite associations of a traditional craft into haunting landscapes depicting scenes of conflict and sexuality.
Like a picaresque tale, the work gradually unfolds to reveal strange truths about the world through a series of misadventures. Merged with the stuff that surrounds us, popular narratives, and personal histories are intertwined so that the imaginary and material realities seem inseparable.
I started by making kinetic and large-scale sculpture, warping ordinary furniture into different shapes or giving it a dramatic other life according to what I saw as its own particular aspirational quality. Then, as now, I was interested in found furniture, household objects, rooms, and furnishings that were tinged with the melodrama or melancholy of suburban family life.
In the past few years I have 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 viewers could walk through the legs.
