Deb Cleland

Activist/Artist/Academic

LGA of Eurobodalla Shire – Brinja-Yuin/Yuin Country

A woman smiling and decorating an outdoor installation with paper, fabric, and plant materials during a garden event.

Deb Cleland (she/her) is an activist/ artist/ academic, with all the compromise and circuitous life paths that those slashes imply. She dabbles in interactive theatre and games, site-specific place-making, and creative non-fiction, hoping to bring her research into social justice, inclusion and sustainability to life through writing and performance. Since 2012, Deb has been devising, directing and participating in ensemble work that asks questions about co-existence, co-operation and how to claim space as an unwelcome body of any kind. After taking a break from the arts following injury and other disruptions, Deb is hoping to reinvigorate her explorations into repair and restoration, wondering how to answer her friend’s provocation in the face of ecosystem collapse: ‘We lost. Now what?’.  

Deb’s installation ‘patch/work’ looks at the labour of repair, and you can contribute to it in this exhibition. Also for Project Alchemy, Deb teamed up with fellow Alchemist Elise May to create a new community dance group in the Eurobodalla. They performed at the River of Art festival, with a luminescent piece called ‘plastic fantastic’, and at the premiere of the documentary The Carnival with a sideshow ensemble complete with dodgem cars and a (live) clown game. She also ran Circus Jams in Batemans Bay and Moruya, an open drop-in session for people to try their hand at juggling, poi, hula hooping and more.

Children and adults at a park participating in a hula hoop activity, with hula hoops on the ground and a sign for a movement jam event in the foreground.
A person wearing a knitted sweater and an Apple Watch, cutting a piece of foam from a larger piece of foam wrapped in plastic bubble wrap, on a wooden table with building materials.
Two women assembling a bubble tent with clear panels in an indoor setting, one woman with short blonde hair smiling and the other with short black hair, wearing black and white sneakers.
Two women inside a room with natural light, one placing bubble wrap and tape on the other, who is standing inside a large, circular bubble wrap costume with a frame.