Debbie Lyddon: A Vision of Sound 

Explore the intersection of visual art and music with textile artist Debbie, who discussed the influence of sound and music on her art in a recent chat for our Friday Feature Artist interview series. 

Debbie Lyddon’s Friday Feature Artist Interview can be found at the bottom of this page.

Norfolk-based artist Debbie Lyddon pays attention to light, weather, water, and sound. 

These natural processes and phenomena inspire her work, which includes drawings, mixed media cloths, sculptures and installations. Impermanence, change, and degeneration plays a large part in making her work, and she can often be found immersing her cloth in the salt and sand that beckons just beyond her studio window. 

Debbie’s inspiration comes from being out in the natural world, walking, noticing, collecting, and being curious. Originally trained as a classical musician at the Royal Academy of Music in London, 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. 

Debbie’s work has been exhibited widely. She has been featured in numerous published books and has even written her own. Fibre Arts Take Two was thrilled and honoured to talk to Debbie about her work and the intersection between music and visual art.

Sound Before Vision

Before Debbie switched to visual arts, she studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

“I spent four years there playing the flute, the recorder and the piano,” she explains. Her studies led to a fair stretch of her career focusing on music, “I played and taught flute for about 10 years until I had my children. It’s really difficult to combine being a classical musician with having children because we were going about the country doing concerts. It’s just really difficult to suddenly go off to another part of the country for the night so that all gradually fell away, which is really sad, but I ended up just teaching. Then the teaching got a bit boring, so the art thing took over.”

Choosing Cloth

While the music was Debbie’s first pursuit, fibre arts have also always been part of her life. “I’ve always been a stitcher and a knitter, and I’ve drawn my whole life, so I suppose the art just took over. Then I did a City and Guilds creative embroidery course, and things snowballed on from there.” 

The cloth was a natural choice of medium for Debbie. “I’ve got this love of cloth, which is just such a lovely material to manipulate. You can use it in so many different ways, not just embroidering on top of it, but you can use it with different materials, which is what I do now with wax and some bitumen and paint. You can manipulate it and put it into different shapes.”

From Aural to Visual

“My training as a musician has really stood me in good stead for being an artist because when you go to a music college, what you’re doing is you’re learning how to listen,” Debbie says on the impact of music on her visual art. “If you’re at an art college, I suppose you could say you’re learning how to look and to observe and to see things, but at music college, you’re sitting with other musicians who have to listen and you have to be able to react to what they’re doing instantaneously. Also, you get this very sensitised approach to sound and so well to music.”

The similarities between the disciplines of art and music don’t end there. “The language between the two is very similar. You would use the word colour in art, which is obvious, but you use colour in music as well. They both use tone, rhythm, and line. There’s this connection between the language you use for one and the other. When you’re trying to make a drawing of sounds, I find that the two languages join together, making it much easier for me to actually make a drawing.”

A Vision of Sound

Sound plays an integral role in Debbie’s creative process. “I see shapes and textures, and rhythms very much in the sounds that I hear,” she says. "So when I do drawings over the sounds around me, I take this training that I’ve had as a musician, and I find I can hear texture, I can hear lines, I can hear shapes in the sounds that I hear, and that I bring those into the drawings that I do. I think in many of the pieces I make, as far as the stitching pieces are concerned, they’re to do with rhythms.”

Part of the power of sound is in what you don’t even realise is there, says Debbie. “I​​f you go out into the landscape, you think it’s quiet, we quite often go out into the countryside, and we say, ‘Oh, it’s so quiet and lovely.’ But it’s never quiet and lovely. In fact, quite often, the country is as loud as the town… but the sounds are different. We have the wind; there are the continuous sounds of seabirds, I mean like nonstop! And the waves… so silence is never there. There’s always some sort of texture or something happening.”