Debbie Lyddon: Sensing Place

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.”

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.”

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.

You can find Debbie on Instagram and Facebook.