denise webber biography

Denise Webber (b1958 Leicestershire UK) is a British artist whose work includes video, photography, drawing and works on paper. Her work has appeared internationally in exhibitions 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 early years in Famagusta in Cyprus, until the outbreak of war in July 1974, when she and her family were evacuated during shell bombardment on the last British convoy to leave the city.

"As a British woman raised in Cyprus, my childhood was suffused with the emotions and responsibilities of being a guest in a foreign society. I still feel in many ways that we are guests on Earth itself and have similar responsibilities."

Her work focuses particularly 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, she frees and restores human dignity to his subjects in a mood of celebration.

Her ongoing series Woman Drawing, which was started in the 1980s, represents the female body in the role of both subject and author, thus reclaiming the body and returning into the woman's hands her creative authorship and power.

Watch video interview with Denise Webber here

Between 2006 and 2014, her work took her on international travels, including Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Stockholm and Reykjavik, which inspired the 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.

Denise has lectured at the University of East London and at London Metropolitan University, and worked as a freelance editor. She lives and works in the south-west UK.

Image: Denise Webber in Famagusta c1961