Deborah Prior
Deborah Prior, 2019. Photo by Matto Charlie Lucas.
Deborah Prior is an early career artist. Her art practice navigates the complexities and pleasures of being and having a body through time-consuming, contemplative craft practices and endurance performance works. Working primarily with salvaged domestic textiles, Deborah crafts objects and actions that consider bodily agency, Feminist modes of production, and the personal and social histories of Domestic work. Most recently she has been investigating the shared visual language of body fragments in medical imaging and religious iconography – creating profane relics that play upon the cultural unease surrounding corporeal bodies.
Prior completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2006, and a PhD at the University of South Australia in 2014. She has exhibited at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, SASA Gallery, Adelaide City Council Art Pod, FELTspace, CACSA’s Project Space, Seedling Art Space, Adelaide Central Gallery, Trocadero Art Space (Melbourne), Rubicon Ari (Melbourne), and Kings Artist Run (Melbourne). She is a past alumni of the Guildhouse Collections Project (SA) and was the 2016 recipient of the Helpmann Academy British School at Rome Residency. In August 2019 she was Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (Melbourne). Deborah has also lived with chronic illness[es] for over 20 years and has more recently decided she is too tired to pretend otherwise.
