Debbie returns to talk to Fibre Arts Take Two about her amazing new Signature course, Sensing Place, and what participants can look forward to.
Debbie Lyddon's Friday Feature Artist Interview can be found at the bottom of this page.
One of our newest online courses, Sensing Place; A Material Response, is hosted by friend to Fibre Arts Debbie Lyddon.
Living and creating by the sea in Norfolk, Debbie’s work embodies the light weather, water and sound of her natural surroundings. Through her unique perspective, Debbie transforms these elements into stunning drawings, mixed media cloths, sculptures and installations. Her approach, deeply inspired by the traditional methods used by sailors to protect their sails and gear, links the historical and utilitarian use of cloth with the materiality of the coastal environment she calls home.
Originally trained as a classical musician at the Royal Academy of Music, Debbie's artistic practice is a symphony of the senses, aiming to evoke a multi-sensory interpretation of the landscape. Debbie brings all this skill and experience to bear in her new course and we recently spoke to her about what participants can expect when they enrol.
Sensing Place: A Material Response
Debbie’s course aims to help artists become more creative by consciously listening to everything that's going on around them.
“It's about looking, listening and touching to create things that have never been thought of before,” Debbie says. “What I'm going to encourage you to do is to go out into the landscape and to sense what's going on, to experience what's going on, using the sense of sight, the sense of sound and the sense of touch. Then you're going to come back and visualise things, make marks and do drawings and stitch. I want you to think about how you interpret that landscape to actually make the marks on the cloth or the paper.”
Debbie hopes to take her students into new areas with this course, “You'd need lots of different techniques quite often to be able to interpret what you're experiencing,” she says. “So I'm giving you lots of different techniques. And a lot of those you'll never have used before.”
“I hope you're going to be coming up with ideas that you've never had, you're going to be playing with materials that you've never used. And I hope that you're going to end up with work that you've never made before as well.”
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Finding Inspiration
Debbie says inspiration can come from your surroundings no matter where you live. “I live in Wales now and it is indeed a very inspiring place to live. It's very beautiful. And I just have to step outside my front door every day. And I think, wow, there's so much to inspire. But I didn't always live in Wales all the time, I lived in southwest London in the suburbs. For a long time, my husband was working in London, my children were at school, and we only came up to Wales just for the holidays.”
“So indeed, I've spent a lot of time in the city. And I've had to make work because of that as well. And again, it's the same thing: getting to know your environment. Quite often, if you're just walking around and you're not paying, or you're not consciously paying attention to what's going on around you, you don't get to know it. But if you're actually going out and you're walking, and you're looking at what's going on, you come to know your place really well.”
Writing
While Debbie does do a lot of drawing as is the traditional way, she has other methods of finding inspiration as well. “People will take out a sketchbook, and they will draw but I personally find that writing is very often the way into making a piece of work.”
“So, for me, I will write lists, I will write just words, I will write sentences or I'll just write things down as I see them. Not in a poetic way. I don't try to write, you know, something very beautiful. While I'm out there. I just write literally what I see. It's a stream of consciousness. It's just there in front of me.”
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The Senses
Debbie’s course will concentrate on sight, touch and sound. “The senses that use your skin, eyes, ears, fingers. And we're starting with looking. And that will probably be the most familiar to people.
Obviously, as an art practice, looking is normally the thing that you do. So a lot of the things I ask you to do during those couple of modules will probably be the most familiar to you. And likewise, with the touching modules, it's all about how we touch, so it's about texture and surface. It's about how the weather touches the objects in the environment and how the weather and the things that are happening around us can alter and change the surface of materials. So that may not be completely different to other things you've done before.
But what probably will be quite different for you is listening, paying conscious attention to the sounds that are going around you, listening to the sounds in the distance, the sounds in the mid-ground, and the sounds right in the foreground, and being able to visualise those in some way.”
Pulling out the Creativity
Debbie highlights that she is always trying to think of ways of pulling out the creativity from her mind. “I suppose that's what I'm trying to do with students as well,” she says. “I'm a great believer in making a connection between different things. So when we go out, and we experience, and we gain more knowledge about things, and we understand things more, I will very often do research. So if I go out and see something, I will look it up in a book afterwards. Because if you can't name something, you don't see it, which is quite an interesting concept, isn't it? If you go out, and you don't know how to name that place, or that leaf or that flower, you don't really see it. But as soon as you can put a name to it, you see it.”
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About Debbie Lyddon
Debbie Lyddon is an artist and maker based in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk.
Debbie’s practice aims to evoke a multi-sensory interpretation of her surroundings to promote an awareness of the relationship between the visual, aural and tactile landscape.
