Deborah Marks’s practice explores the psychological dimensions of the human condition and how inner experience shapes perception and the creative act. Drawing on subconscious and unconscious states, her work investigates the fluid boundary between internal worlds – thoughts, feelings, memory, imagination and personal perception – and the external world of environments, events and others. Painting becomes a means of translating reflection and emotion into visual form, developing a language for what is sensed rather than spoken.
The Uncertainty Series extends this inquiry by embracing ambiguity and resisting fixed interpretation. For Marks, interiority is both vulnerable and empowering, with uncertainty operating as a generative space where multiple meanings can coexist. Her process-driven approach moves between careful observation and intuitive, improvisational mark-making. Traditional painterly conventions establish form and spatial structure, while disruption through gesture, chance and revision invites instinct and subjective insight, allowing abstraction and representation to coexist.
Figures and environments inhabit dreamlike, indeterminate spaces between knowing and not knowing, their partial visibility suggesting fragility, distance and the complexities of being seen. Ultimately, the work negotiates the relationship between inner experience and external form, positioning painting as a site of inquiry, reflection and discovery.
