Debra began her early career as a graphic designer graduating from Art Center Los Angeles, then expanded her art training to work as an art consultant for five star hotel projects throughout Asia. Later, designing landscapes after receiving a bachelors degree in Landscape Architecture from U.C. Berkeley, she began to integrate natural form into her works of art both in landscape design and her sculptural works.
Today Debra Stephens is a local artisan of Boulder, Colorado. Although she communicates her work through a variety of materials and scales, her work throughout maintains a sculptural identity of nature and it’s history. “I look at nature and see it deeply, it’s forms, it’s patterns, it’s rhythms and textures and draw upon it all. I want to merge rugged natural beauty with sculptural eloquence.” These raw yet determined sculptures take form from finely crafted jewelry to larger scale plaster and feather sculptures. Her series “Flies” is particularly notable not only for its unique use of feathers and found objects, but also for it unique play on the ancient artistry of fly making. An art so practical, yet beautiful where form has always followed function. Debra has instead created it’s function to follow its form. Celebrating and elaborating the beauty of the craft through large scale floating and pedestal mounted flys.
Her Jewelry ranges from metal smithing more delicate works, to something more akin to her fly series using raw materials such as fur, bone and feathers to create elaborate necklaces and earrings as “wearable works of art”. Many of her recent metal smithing designs are inspired by her love of natural forms such as leaves, seedpods and mountain scape profiles. One of her latest silver metal smithing series incorporates the details, textures, and forms of antique Japanese basket designs. She is currently represented and showcasing many of these pieces at Adorned Gallery, located in Boulder, Colorado.
