Deborah Prior

Deborah Prior is a mid-career artist whose 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, Prior crafts objects and actions that consider bodily agency, Feminist modes of production, and the personal and social histories of domestic work as a squatter/colonist living on Kaurna Land. Most recently she has been thinking about the body in the landscape, and the deeply anxious state of attempting to live well with an unwell planet.

Prior completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts 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, Adelaide Central Gallery, Trocadero Art Space (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 2019 she was an Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (Melbourne), and in 2021 Artist in Residence at Grindell’s Hut (Country Arts SA).

@deborah_prior

Deborah Prior, Easter in the Anthropocene, 2021-22, Installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Sam Roberts
Deborah Prior, Pastoral Apocalypse, 2021-22, Linen, studio ephemera, woollen yarn, plastic beads,102 x 136 cm