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The week before Easter, I met Debra James Percival at her Charlottetown home. Upstairs, creativity was springing out of her living room in the form of her children's Easter tree-an explosion of beribboned branches, natural buds opening in the indoor warmth, hung with her pick of forty dozen eggs hollowed, dyed, and painted by her children from the their very earliest Easters to the present.
Downstairs, creativity has spread itself into Expanding Horizons Studio, Debra's own printmaking studio and teaching space. The studio became necessary when Debra realized just how much space her creativity was taking up. "When I work, I'm annoying," she admits, laughing. "I fill up all the drying racks with prints." Since she's not a traditional printmaker but is doing mixed media, her prints sometimes take a month to dry on the racks she fills. "Everyone growls at me," she says, and even though she also says, "It's polite grumbling," she decided to take a chance and to build her own studio. The bright, well-equipped basement studio-built to her specific needs by her husband, Terry-is a far cry from what was available when she first returned to PEI from her art studies at NSCAD and she had to press woodcuts by jumping up and down on them on her kitchen floor, in the days before the Island's active Printmakers' Council existed.
Having a printmaking studio in her home has challenged Debra James Percival to expand her horizons in unexpected ways. Traditional printmaking techniques tend to be toxic, creating the kinds of fumes she wouldn't want to leak up to her children's creative space. As a result, Debra has transformed her approach to printing and now works exclusively with non-toxic materials and methods. Non-toxic printmaking has "opened up the whole world," she says, partly because of the connections she has been able to make with artists around the world through the Internet, partly because the painterly medium is "freeing" and has potential for developing new kinds of images. Her first print from her studio-a woodcut with a monoprint background and an overlay of handpainted flowers-sold easily. "It was a good omen for the studio!" she says.
Her current series of prints, set in an idealized, imaginative garden, is called "Return to Eden" and reflects women's comings and partings in relationships. She deals frequently with themes of women's work and shows me the plate for a print of an exhausted woman beside a flowering broom. In the simplest terms, the image was inspired by her own compulsion to sweep the floor before going to bed because she can't bear to wake up to the dirt, but she knows the image she prints will take on new associations. Another print, she points out, has actual buttons sewn on to the middles of the flowers, to remind of women's work with clothing. Even paintings of children show the motherly work of worrying. Despite the freedom in the images of play, Debra knows, "When you turn your back on a playground, there's fear of what will happen."
Setting up an independent studio and making a living as a printmaker and teacher is a challenge in as small a community as PEI, and Debra finds most days, she's just "trying to come up with bread and butter." Her next goal (almost accomplished) in the studio is to get her darkroom up and running-partly to free up the creativity of her students, who in the past have been excited about manipulating photographic images.
Debra James Percival at Expanding Horizons plans to "just keep working along," expanding slowly. Like any vision or inspiration worth waiting for, Debra says, "I hope if I keep working, it'll break through."