'In the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe discoursed upon what he called the “Philosophy of Furniture”; today, in order to consider in depth the work of Debbie Lawson a psychology of furniture would be a necessary requirement. One imagines that something a little more fine-grained than Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of space” might be a useful tool as well, an analytic method subtle enough to penetrate the niceties of Lawson’s eerily engaging work.
'Objects that are apparently coherent and stable merge or fall apart, slyly transforming themselves, behaving in an atrocious fashion considering the calm and expressly inanimate order with which we might normally expect them to comply. For furnishings do not, as a rule, penetrate the space of adjacent objects, their forms are fixed in place, predictable and reliable in their mutual coexistence. But in Lawson’s “eccentric spaces” (to borrow a term from Robert Harbison) the domestic framework she has constructed is destabilised, pulled apart from within itself. One might recall in relation to this the much misused but important (and here more than mildly appropriate) concept and practice of Deconstruction, which is Jacques Derrida’s name for an almost shockingly prolific process of instability and self-critique.
'The purportedly inorganic entities featured in her mock-bourgeois tableaux have, it would appear, lived a life of action out of sight of the viewer. If, in the past, some of the artist’s work involved pieces with parts that actually readjusted themselves in proximity to the individuals present before them, in her recent installations Lawson has not allowed the viewer to witness the slipping and sliding of parts; or rather, the movement of a plant constructed from a Persian carpet is implied not actual, an effect that is arguably all the stronger for its encouragement of imagination and studied reflection.'
From an essay by Peter Suchin, 2008
Nettie Horn Gallery
25b Vyner Street
London
E2 9DG
United Kingdom
Europe
