INTRO
INTRO
Debra Werblud is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working in Venice, Italy. Her career ranges from installation art to social practice art that includes concept and pilot projects commissioned by foundations, institutions, industry, and the private sector. Her studio practice specializes in materials and processes of non-traditional two-dimensional representation and reproduction, from manual to mechanical to digital.
Early studies in archaeology, anthropology, environmental design, and demotic architecture as well as training in technical drawing, stone-carving, and participatory design continue to underpin her pursuits both in visual art and her collaborations with scientists, scholars, poets, architects, planners, and craftsmen. Each project is conceived as a vehicle for accessing the overlooked, for triggering recognition in processes of interdependence.
Debra’s projects register a course of inquiry into persistent social and moral issues. As the Italian journalist Orsola Casagrande wrote: “Rather than a statement, it is a permanent questioning. Rather than an object, it’s an ongoing process.”
Debra’s professional activity commenced as a sculptor developing concept models as a tool for dialogue in urban planning projects. In 1994, her focus shifted to light-based industrial printmaking processes (silkscreen, stencil, photolithograph), later adding video projection and digital technologies, for recording thematic inquiry as visual constructs. Since 2021, she has been repurposing plastic substrates from previous projects. Once printed surfaces are painted over then reworked by drawing with pencils and chalk or etching with surgical instruments: layered and burnished pigments, incised film, stratified surfaces; attempts to record a missing narrative, allegories of deliberate erasure. Having abandoned earlier processes of production and reproduction, the act of drawing by incision or layering is both eradication and emergence, primordial and sculptural.
More generally, the media and techniques carry a double significance: incised lines are scars or vestigial traces but also marking time; a cut-out (or contour) denotes both erasure and ‘a thing expectant’; mulberry paper used in a print cycle relates to the imagery of a plant of the same genus as well as to the cultural identity of the project’s client... Recursion, specularity, generation/degeneration, substantive/precarious are iterated in the materials, methods, and imagery.
In thematic installations, an assemblage of engraved templates comprises a matrix; a projector’s beam is a third eye; a gallery’s concrete floor becomes the water in which a figure’s reflection from a video projection appears submerged. The components circumscribe a hollow, a liminal space that shifts to describe a context into which a visitor is mise en abyme. In that place, a preverbal narrative is shared, one integral to the artist's process – that of inchoate feeling, of discomfort, undoing, decentring, but maybe also of recognition, reckoning, or respite.