About

Debbie Lawson graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, a BA in Fine Art (first class) from Central Saint Martins and a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of East Anglia. Her work is held in the following collections: the Saatchi Gallery, the UK Parliamentary Collection, Nottingham Castle Museum, Mario Testino, the University of the Arts London, the University of Dundee, Perth Art Gallery, and many others in the UK and worldwide.

Solo shows include Hidden Territories at Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York; Art In Focus: Debbie Lawson at the Rockefeller Center, New York, commissioned by Art Production Fund; the Fergusson Prize: Magic Carpet at the Fergusson Gallery, Perth; Living Rooms at Nordisk Kunst Plattform, Norway, supported by the British Council; and Chairway To Heaven at the Economist Plaza, London, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society.

Recent group exhibitions include Material Power, National Trust Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire; the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024, London; Carpets of Eden, Gardens of Fantasy, Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai; Reimag(in)ing The Victorians at Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham; Seeing With Your Feet: The Carpet in Contemporary Art at Museum Villa Rot, Germany. 

She was born in Dundee, and lives in Kent.

Debbie Lawson is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

I live and work in rural Kent, surrounded by fields, furniture and fabric. The home has always felt alive to me: tables seem to shift, carpets ripple, objects hum with secret personalities. I make sculptural installations that occupy a space between the real and the imagined. Chairs stretch, animals emerge from patterned carpets and familiar household things begin to move or disguise themselves.

My work grows out of that space where the ordinary becomes uncanny – where a living room can turn into a forest or a vast rolling tundra landscape. I’ve always been drawn to stories in which inanimate things come to life – the magic pot of porridge, Mary Poppins’s tidying bedroom – tales that hint that our surroundings have desires and mischief of their own.

Later, I fell for gothic novels and folk tales, where beauty often hides something wilder underneath. Those narratives taught me that domestic order and wilderness are closer than they seem.

I often use traditional patterned carpets in my work. They are familiar objects in the home, but also suffocating, decorative skins. When animals appear inside them – a bear, a stag, a fox – they seem to be camouflaged, though they rebel against the very fabric of their confinement.

When people encounter my work I hope they feel a flicker of recognition: that strange mix of comfort and unease when something you thought you knew starts to breathe.

'The Scottish-born multimedia artist creates a variety of work — from a set of chairs dancing the can-can to wood panelling imbued with scenes of intimacy — but perhaps none quite so striking as her tapestries, to which Lawson has affixed the heads and sometimes full bodies of various fauna. The effect is Magic Eye-esque: stand in front of the work and the beast, be it a bear or a stag, all but disappears; move slightly to the right or left and the animal reveals itself in three dimensions.'
Rebecca Tucker, The National Post (Canada)

‘The heady incense air of Arabian Nights seeps in as one feels seduced into playful reverie. Anything that infiltrates the safe realms of the family home with hints of unpredictable and uncontrollable spirit is bound to transport us directly back to childhood daydreams.’
Robert Clark, The Guardian (UK)

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