Deborah Lynn Irmas is a Los Angeles based visual artist. Her practice considers the textile and tactile materiality that was deeply embedded in her childhood. Growing up in a household surrounded by fabrics, yarn and other sewing notions, she developed an attachment to the materials that her Salvadoran mother worked with. “Everyday was the same…I would come home from school and my mother would be working with her hands on the floor surrounded by all sorts of materials. I often work the same way now which gives me a sense of home and comfort.” Deborah Lynn’s work has evolved into a recognition of her mother’s history, her Salvadoran birthright and her own bi-cultural narrative.
With her most recent work, she explores the complex interplay between identity, materials and simplification. “The art I make investigates materiality, abstraction, minimalism, and perception through geometric configurations”. Although there is a dedicated narrative that resonates with her own personal history, simultaneously, Deborah Lynn has simplified the visual elements to reveal the unknown and become in a way “non” narrative. Her acceptance of what is essential…“yarn”, is used as crochet, humbly assembled yet still an adorning medium which needs no other elements to find the underlying truth. “I have accepted the necessary. The things I make are uncomplicated, including only the basic components without embellishment and can be arranged and re-arranged into new combinations. I am humbled by the minimalists of the sixties.” Deborah Lynn has acknowledged her own cultural history through the use of tangible materials and the ideas formatted by the minimalist and formalist art movements that proceeded her.
MUSEUM PERMANENT COLLECTION
MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art)
EDUCATION
Tom Wudl Studio, Painting
Gary Paller, Printmaking
University of California Los Angeles, Surface Pattern Design
Art Center, Graphic Design
Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design, Fashion Illustration
B.F.A. University of California Los Angeles, Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Art (PSGA)