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Debbie Lynn Gulley
USA
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"My art has flaws, can scratch like claws, yet have no paws."
Debbie Lynn Gulley builds three dimensional stars out of string and light. Each piece begins as a simple frame and is wound, strand by strand, into a form that seems to float in the air. The five works in this exhibition are her 3D Wishing Stars in fluorescent green, lime green, fluorescent orange, metallic blue, and yellow. Under ordinary light they read as bold geometric objects. Once the lights inside them come on, the string begins to flicker, glimmer, and shimmer, and the star changes character completely. Gulley calls the effect three dimensional in her own playful spelling, "3-[DEB]mensional," a joke that carries a truth. These are not pictures of stars. They are objects a viewer can walk around, look through, and watch shift as the light moves. Her medium is patient, repetitive, and entirely handmade.
Metallic Blue Frame Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
I was inspired by the very colorful pinwheel lollipop.
Her materials are humble. Gulley works with neon string and crochet string, wrapping it in tight, even passes until the surface becomes a field of color with real depth behind it. There is no shortcut in any of it. Each strand is placed by hand, and if the winding is uneven the geometry drifts, and the geometry is the whole point. She has made roughly forty stars over the years, along with three rectangular pieces that she restrung three separate times before she was satisfied with them. Two flags belong to the same family of work, one a garden stake flag and one a flat piece with braided red and white string, finished earlier this year as a shadow box with a collage of photographs from September 11. Every one of these objects was strung by hand.
Fluorescent Green Frame Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
This piece is inspired by my friend, who is a Packers fan. Packers colors are green and yellow. I asked what his and his wife's favorite colors are.
"A flag made of string sounded impossible, so I said, I bet I can. Then I did."
Beyond the stars, Gulley has pushed the same technique into language. By tipping a star and adjusting how the string is wound, she discovered that the form could become a letter. From there she strung a complete alphabet and the numbers zero through nine, each character built from the same logic as the stars themselves. A heart is currently in progress. She also makes silhouettes of family members and cats, and a totem pole with five faces on it, the bottom face representing someone who has since passed away. Gulley does not describe herself as an artist in the formal sense. She has said she was a hidden crafty artist most of her life, someone who made things at home and rarely showed them. The exhibition is part of a decision to stop hiding.
Fluorescent Orange Frame Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
Brilliant, bright colors: the first of a set of triplets.
Every piece in this body of work traces back to a single object. Gulley's father once built a yard decoration, a white star of PVC pipe edged with tape in red and blue. She borrowed it for two full weeks, studied how it was put together, and began building her own versions in string. That borrowed star became the seed for decades of making. The Wishing Stars on view are direct descendants of it, refined through years of trial and error. Gulley is entirely self taught. No one showed her how to wind the string evenly, how to finish a piece cleanly, or how to place the lights so the whole form glows. She figured each problem out on her own, one star at a time, and the current work took all of last year to complete.
This is an identical twin. I have identical twin nephews who inspired this set. It also reminds me of the sun.
Yellow Frame Identical Twin Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
"Pictures never do them justice. You have to see the string catch the light and watch it flicker as you walk by. That is why I always wish people could stand in front of one, or at least see it on video, before they decide what they think."
"It started with my dad. He made a white star out of PVC pipe with red and blue tape on it and put it in the yard as a decoration. I asked if I could borrow it, and he let me keep it for two weeks. I studied it the whole time, trying to figure out how the angles worked and how I could do the same thing with string instead of pipe. When I gave it back, I already had my first one going. After that I could not stop. Many stars later, I tipped one on its side and realized it looked like a letter. That is how the alphabet came about, and then the numbers. Nobody taught me any of this. I just kept pulling string until it looked right."
Lime Green Frame Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
This work was inspired by a flower.
Middle school is where the thread first appeared. Gulley remembers a class in which students worked with wire, and something about bending a line into a shape stayed with her. In 1978 she made a piece from string and drinking straws and titled it "VISION," a name that feels prophetic now. That early work already contained the ideas she still uses: a rigid frame, a flexible line, and the tension between them. She was not thinking of it as art at the time. It was a thing she made because she wanted to see whether it could be done. The impulse has never changed, even as the pieces have grown more ambitious and the materials have moved from plain string to neon colors that hold light.
Natural Frame Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
This is an explosion of color.
Shop class gave her a lesson of a different sort. A piece she made there was broken, and after graduation she rebuilt it rather than letting it go. That habit of repair runs through everything she has done since. The three rectangles that were restrung three times are the clearest example, but the pattern shows up everywhere in her practice. Gulley does not discard a form that fails. She takes it apart, studies what went wrong, and strings it again. She once made six sets of matching pieces, twins of one another, and six of them melted like cotton candy. Rather than treat the loss as an ending, she treated it as information. The stars in this exhibition are the result of that stubbornness, each one carrying the corrections learned from the ones that came before.
This work was inspired by the stars in the sky, which look like polka dots.
Natural Frame Glow and Polka Dots Multi-Colored String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
Years of work were nearly erased in 1996. Gulley was laid off after eighteen years at her job, and in the aftermath she lost her house and the storage space where much of her earlier art was kept. Most of it was gone. Her sister Vickey managed to save a few pieces, and those survivors are among the oldest objects still in her possession. Gulley speaks about this period without bitterness. She often repeats the line that what does not kill you makes you stronger, and she means it literally. The making did not stop. It slowed, went quiet, and eventually returned with more purpose than before. The stars she builds now are brighter, larger, and more carefully engineered than anything she made before the loss, as if the work absorbed the lesson along with her.
"Some are better than others, but I love every single one of them."
Loss also shaped the two flags. The 9/11 piece, with its braided red and white string and its collage of photographs, is the most somber object she has made, and she describes it as very sad and very different at the same time. It was finished only this year, decades after the event, which says something about how long an idea can wait inside her. The garden stake flag is lighter in spirit but built with the same care. Both grew from a challenge she set for herself, a quiet bet with herself that a flag could be strung by hand and made to hold together. Gulley likes that sort of dare. Much of her work begins with the question of whether a shape is possible, and the answer is usually found only after several attempts.
Blue Frame Red, White and Blue String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, star embellishments, lights)
NFS
15.75" x 11.25" x 7.25"
A hand-strung American flag in a silver frame, with red and white and blue string forming the stripes, white stars set into the canton, and lights lining the frame. Part of the artist's patriotic series, made in honor of 9/11.
Everything she makes is meant to be seen in person and, ideally, in motion. Gulley has learned that photographs flatten her work. A still image records the color and the outline but misses the way light travels through the strands and the way the star seems to change as a viewer moves around it. She posted videos of sports logos she had strung on YouTube and received little response, an experience that taught her the work needs the right audience more than it needs a wider one. For this exhibition, the stars are presented so that their depth and glow can be understood. Visitors are encouraged to look at each piece more than once, since the same star can look calm in daylight and electric after dark.
This work was inspired by a snowflake.
Pink Frame Pink and White String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
Hidden for most of her life, this work is finally being shown. Gulley does not intend to sell the pieces on view. She wants them seen, and she wants the story behind them known. She has written a short rhyme about the work that admits its imperfections and its sharpness in the same breath, and she is fond of saying that certain stars turned out better than the rest and that she loves each one regardless. That honesty is the heart of the exhibition. These are not flawless objects. They are the product of a woman who kept making things through job loss, a lost home, melted pieces, and years of silence, and who decided at last that what she had made was too lovely to remain hers alone.
Purple Frame Purple and White String Wishing Star | Mixed Media (string, wood, nails, light)
NFS
18.5" x 18.5"
Purple is the color of passion. This is also a twin.
"I hid this my whole life. It is too beautiful to keep for my eyes only."
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