Deborah Wace

Deborah Wace is a fabric designer, ecological activist, plant advocate and professional printmaker from Tasmania. Her artwork is highly detailed and intimate, a window into the botany of Tasmanian Native Orchids, Rainforest and Buttongrass and Marine plant communities. She is a graduate from Canberra School of Arts (1988) with a Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts, Printmaking. Drawing on her thirty years of plant collecting, her significant personal herbarium has been fully digitised. Combined with dry point and monoprint original artwork, these images are then layered using computer software to create her rich complex botanical designs.

She prints digitally onto silk and other fabric developing designs for cloth, wallpaper and limited edition fine art and also teaches printmaking from her 9^th floor studio at 65 Murray St Hobart, Tasmania.

Immersion in and deeper understanding of wild place through botany is her aim. Forming a link to the earliest European Botanical Historical collections is a strong thread through her artwork. Deborah’s recent Churchill Fellowship to study the early French botanical historical record from Tasmania will bring forward a new and richly layered range of designs for print onto fabric.
Deborah uses her plant specimen collection and her print making to create an intersection between botany and fine fabrics, refreshing a conversation about ecology and threatened species and the protection of valuable ecological/ historical/ cultural environments.

The Sartorial Naturalist – 12 min film, depicts the artist's process of collecting and pressing plants throughout the landscape of Tasmania, and how she dreams them into her designs. This is a multiform art collaboration with nationally and internationally recognised skilled professionals in the Tasmanian film community, plus design, cinematic, post-production, music and costume and dance professionals that captures the beauty and fragility of some of Tasmania’s endangered flora.