Ornamental Carpets Release Wild Animals in Debbie Lawson’s Provocative Sculptures

Debbie Lawson is known for her large-scale sculptures of life-size animals cloaked in ornamental carpets. Starting with an armature of wire mesh, masking tape, and Jesmonite resin, she meticulously cuts and tucks Persian carpet around every limb, building a surface that looks unbroken.

As if the animals have materialized from within the textiles and are temporarily frozen in a stage of metamorphosis, we encounter them on the verge of making a move. In the artist’s solo exhibition, In a Cowslip's Bell I Lie, at Sargent’s Daughters, she provokes “questions about the relationships between decoration and nature, craft and camouflage.” The title is a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when the spirit Ariel sings about freedom and the carefree, even charmed connection to nature following his release from forced servitude.

Lawson draws on the lineage of nature motifs in art, especially wildlife. She alludes to “the natural and animal forms hidden within decorative forms and patterns, from the frescoes of Pompeii to French Rococo moldings to Venetian stone carvings—the designs of William Morris and even the New York Public Library’s lions.” Think clawfoot tubs, heraldic animals carved into hearths and other decorative interior elements, and the more modern form-meets-function works of Les Lalannes, which often incorporate birds and mammals into designs for benches and lamps.

The dialogue between art and decor parallels inherent tensions between interiors and the outside world—refinement and domesticity versus nature or indeed, the wilderness. Lawson also thinks about the gendered history of home life and craft, which has long been associated with “women’s work.” This is deeply personal for the artist, as textile- and art-making go back generations in both her family and her hometown of Dundee, Scotland.