Deborah Twining is an Adelaide Hills based artist and arts educator. Her practice spans 20 years in South Australia, Western Australia, and regional North Queensland. As a multidisciplinary artist, her curiosity for learning, experimentation and interaction has led to a playful and explorative approach to her community and arts education-based work. Her personal arts practice often explores the subtle sensitivities and intricacies between people, community, and nature. Her recent exhibitions involve ceramic sculptural work, Sky Blankets and Seabeds, at WonderGround, Barossa and textile installation work, Renewal, for the Retelling exhibition at Fabrik, Lobethal.
For the last 10 years Deb has run a weekly art school, TwiningArts, based in her studio at the Hahndorf Academy. The school caters for over 80 students from ages 5 to 20 years. They express a diversity of people, with classes providing an inclusive space for many neurodiverse and non-binary students. TwiningArts seeks to guide and inspire creative development, fostering personal growth and expression, rather than teaching through prescribed learning. Students are encouraged to develop their own creative pathways and language while developing advanced technical skills in many mediums.
Deb’s arts practice has seen the development of collaborative community projects and children’s art activations for the Adelaide Festival, regional galleries, and organisations around South Australia. Running the Adelaide Writers Week (AWW) Kids Day studio since 2020, her highlight from this time has been working with Patricia Piccinini and her ‘Sky Whales’ to develop children’s activations that represented Piccinini’s book, Every Heart Sings. Deb’s AWW work has also seen her develop activations including Dr Seuss’s lost manuscript The Horse Museum, a kelp forest installation, a dance party, a quest for identity and kindness, amongst other AWW adventures. Other notable projects include being part of the Creative Recovery programs at Fabrik, Lobethal. This involved listening, supporting, and holding creative space for bushfire affected families from the 2019 Cudlee Creek fireground. These projects ran for a couple of years following the devasting impacts of fire on this community.
