Deborah Garwood

Deborah Garwood is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work explores the interdependence of nature, culture, and technology. She has exhibited sculpture, photography, video, installation, drawing, intaglio prints, and artist’s books in New York and abroad since 1980.

In 1997 Garwood initiated a project entitled Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place. Bringing a variety of cameras and films to the same site in New Jersey, she has been documenting and interpreting the forest, pond, and adjacent abandoned orchard for almost ten years. The archive is a personal reflection on the duration of this forest at the edge of suburbia. It is also a study of changing photographic tastes and technologies—from early 20th-century box cameras to digital imagery. Evans Pond reflects the artist’s fascination with the natural world, and synthesizes her study of sculpture, photography, and technology. Her observation of seasonal change at Evans Pond led to an interest in astronomy, and the idea that astronomy has been an abiding inspiration for culture in human civilizations. Garwood’s influences range from the eclectic photographs of August Rodin’s sculpture, which she studied in 1991 at the Musée Rodin, Paris, to Minimalist-era sculptors’ use of photography in relation to their presence in the landscape.

Active also as an independent scholar, Garwood has applied an interdisciplinary approach to her research on art, science, and technology. She has participated in a number of international conferences on astronomy and the humanities, presenting papers on astronomical themes in Marcel Proust (publication pending); astronomy and existentialism in the fiction of Albert Camus (publication pending); and a photographic essay entitled Paris Solstice that was inspired by Proust and French astronomical history. Garwood is also active as an art critic and has contributed criticism on the fine and performing arts to several journals, including PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press), to which she recently became a contributing editor; Art Journal; and Sculpture Magazine.

Born in Camden, NJ, Garwood earned a BA at Oberlin College and an MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York. She also studied visual art at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She was the recipient of the Robert Smithson Memorial Scholarship for Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2004 she earned a certificate in astronomy from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and has pursued independent research at the Paris Observatory.