The Great Boat Approaches: Opening Event

The Great Boat Approaches is an inquiry into relationships and mortality, charting Deborah’s journey through her husband’s terminal illness, their travels together, their return to the homeland, and life after his death. Poetry sits alongside gestural charcoal and pastel drawings, watercolours, oil paintings and recent abstract figurative acrylic works, creating a body of work that moves between memory, lived experience and reflection.

Informed by her background in arts therapy and by Expressionism, Deborah’s process begins with what she describes as a “felt sense on the edge of the unknown.” Working rapidly and intuitively, she allows one mark to lead to another before returning to the work through slower reflection, layering, scraping and refinement. Her interest in Expressionism is connected to theologian Paul Tillich’s idea of the form as a way of reaching beneath the surface of experience towards deeper spiritual truths.

Much of the material in this exhibition grew from an early morning practice of charcoal drawing during her husband’s illness. Fear, doubt, hope, faith, pain, love, despair and confusion move in and out of focus across the works. This intuitive practice became a way of responding to whatever was present at the time, while recurring images gradually emerged across the years.

Boats toss in a Turkish bay, black pebbles drag in the tide at Santorini, and cliffs fall sharply in the South Downs of the UK. On returning home, another image appears: a great boat waiting and rocking in the sky, becoming a metaphor for death and mortality.

Rather than offering a fixed narrative, Deborah leaves space for viewers to bring their own experiences to the work. As she writes, her hope is for the work to resonate as “a shared sense of humanity”, allowing others to find their own narratives rather than being bound by hers.

The opening evening is an opportunity to experience the exhibition for the first time and meet Deborah Norrie-Jones.

This exhibition will also support Cancer Council, with Creative Room Art Space donating 5% of the sale price of original works sold through the gallery from our commission.

Free entry. Registration recommended.