Artist Statement

I have enjoyed making things since childhood and discovered a talent for drawing in my early teens.

In the 1980's I studied 3-dimensional design, going on to work as a commercial interior designer in London. However, prompted by illness, my creative interests shifted, and after a period of personal change I relocated to Sheffield and retrained as an art psychotherapist, qualifying in 2005. This experience, as well as my subsequent work as art therapy practitioner and educator, profoundly influenced my artistic practice as I began to make more intuitively, responding to different situations and exploring aspects of the human condition through more abstract artworks across a range of media, including clay.

Pursuing my interest in how art can help sensitise us to the affective nature of human situations and experience, my recent Ph.D. research in fine art includes site specific projects, installations, sound pieces, writings, and other ‘things’, all of which may be thought of as multi-layered weavings that respond to the particular situation (see https://www.debbiemichaels.co.uk).

While my artistic practice does not settle comfortably in one place, I continue to be drawn to the complex nature of the human condition and the dynamic relation between internal and external worlds. Whether drawing, modelling with clay, assembling objects and things, or writing, it is through the making process – the ‘work’ of art – that I come to understand more about the materials and tools I am using, the subject I am addressing, the broader context in which the work sits, and myself.