Denise Webber

Denise Webber (b1958 Leicestershire UK) is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes video, photography, drawings, paintings and works on paper. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Tate Modern London, Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art Melbourne and is represented in the Arts Council England Collection and the Tate Archive.

She spent her childhood and teenage years in Famagusta in Cyprus, where her father was a civil servant working for British government communications. The juxtaposition of hedonism with political violence on the island led eventually to the outbreak of war. She was just sixteen when she and some of her family were evacuated during shell bombardment on the last British convoy to leave the city in July 1974. She cites witnessing violence in the street and the dangers of being visible during curfew. The feelings of insignificance and the legacy of impermanence have persisted in her subconscious and hence in her art practice. “I see the body as a fragile vessel in which we navigate through our narrow segment of the world: its windows, its barriers, shorelines, the pressures of physical displacement. An artist’s work is a form of testimony. How can it be otherwise?”

She studied Fine Art and History of Art at the University of Reading in Berkshire UK and founded a studio in Somerset UK in the early 1980s. Moving to London in the late 80s, she rented a live/work warehouse near Hoxton Square and participated in the awakening creative scene there which exploded into consciousness in the 1990s.

The pioneering American feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson stayed for a week at her London home and studio in 1998. Denise describes their late-evening heart-to-hearts as “from the soul” and as instrumental in allowing her to merge her identity as both a woman and an artist. “There were existential challenges for creative women at the time, on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Denise’s work is embedded with feminist concerns as filtered through her own experience, including her childhood habit of wandering for hours alone in the raw landscape and ancient ruins near her home. She focuses upon women's experiences of liberation, transition or transformation. In her video animation Clay (1998) she repositions the 19th century still photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, drawing attention to small revelatory details, particularly of Muybridge's images of women. With this modest gesture, she frees and restores human dignity to his subjects in a mood of celebration.

Health problems in the early 2000s signalled a dark period mentally, culminating in a breakdown and a tiring recovery over several years, leaving her unable to create work. Between 2006 and 2014, work took her to Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Stockholm and Reykjavik. This interlude of travel and displacement fuelled her photographic series ‘Everywhere that is not Home’. The series documents a psychological battle between the safety of a room and the unknown dangers of the street, or between the agoraphobic and nomadic versions of the self.

Commenced in the 1980s, her ongoing series ‘Woman Drawing’ expresses a delight in self-assured femininity. It quietly continues to reinforce the simple idea of representing the female in the role of both subject and author, thus reclaiming the body and returning into the woman's hands her creative authorship and power.

Denise has taught at the University of East London and at London Metropolitan University, and worked as a freelance editor. She lives and works in Somerset UK.