Deborah Maier

I’ve long been fascinated by working with ephemeral materials—sand, soil, spices, tea and coffee—and the interplay that manipulating them sets in motion: physical and emotional serendipities. Some images are animated at speed under the camera, while others beg for more attention: layers of pattern, exactitude of pose or expression. After some resistance, I now find in digital drawing—‘skating on glass’—similar pleasures, the greatest being ease of erasure.
Much of my life now is intensely verbal, and the Sandecalcomania images (with an earthy bow to Max Ernst and other Surrealists) form an antidote to the ‘stark economy’ of writing poetry and drama.

The newer Tannin Prints also intrigue me with their semi-random quality. Each unique print needs to be ‘read’ to discover what words or further images beg to be overlaid or interwoven.  Each medium has its own kind of freedom, and its strictures.

Having been a child who drew and wrote, and having started animating as a program designer at Educational Television in Tehran many years ago, then worked as a translator/copy writer in a newspaper there, I’ve since pursued writing and visual arts with equal passion; those domains may overlap, but sometimes one is simply the more apt way to capture fleeting notions or longer narratives.  http://deborahmaier.com