Deborah Sisco is a Charleston-based painter whose abstract oil works explore memory, emotion, and transformation. Her practice blends traditional techniques with experimental processes, including AI-generated inspirations, to create layered and textured surfaces that evoke both spontaneity and depth. Sisco is widely recognized for her ability to merge classical discipline with contemporary inquiry, allowing her paintings to feel intimate, atmospheric, and conceptually rich.
Her most recent exhibition, Between Stillness and Disappearance, currently on view at the USC Beaufort Center for the Arts, reflects her personal journey alongside her husband through Alzheimer’s. The exhibition offers a poignant meditation on presence, loss, and enduring love. Through this deeply personal project, Sisco invites viewers to consider how memory persists even as it fades, and how a tender connection shapes identity over time. Her work has also received international attention, including the Leonardo Da Vinci Contemporary Artist Award and participation in Art Expo NYC 2025.
Artistic Foundations and Evolving Practice
Sisco’s work is grounded in oil painting but expands far beyond the boundaries of traditional studio practice. Drawing on both material intuition and conceptual curiosity, she blends paint with poetic language, immersive design, and digital tools. AI-generated text and visual prompts often serve as companions in her process, opening new pathways for discovery while reinforcing her interest in the instability of perception.
Her surfaces are layered, scraped, rebuilt, and softened, reflecting the fluid nature of memory. Rather than presenting a singular truth, her paintings hold multiple states at once. They embrace ambiguity as a space for emotional resonance and allow viewers to inhabit moments where clarity meets dissolution.
Artist Statement in Practice
At the center of Sisco’s philosophy is a focus on thresholds. She is drawn to the boundaries between presence and absence, clarity and blurring, emergence and disappearance. These liminal states guide her creative decisions. Whether she is developing a painting, designing an exhibition environment, or composing AI-assisted poetic plaques, she works intuitively within these in-between spaces.
Her practice is materially driven and emotionally attuned. Oil on wood panel and canvas becomes a field for gestural marks, erasure, delicate veils of color, and rhythmic opacity. Across media, she integrates text, sound, and spatial design to construct environments that invite quiet reflection. Instead of offering narrative explanations, her work presents atmospheres that open emotional and psychological landscapes. She approaches each project as a dialogue between material and memory, abstraction and atmosphere, intuition and structure. Ambiguity, for her, is not a void to be resolved but a field to be felt.
Between Stillness and Disappearance
Sisco’s exhibition Between Stillness and Disappearance is the culmination of years of inquiry into memory, loss, and emotional transformation. Rather than portraying Alzheimer’s directly, she approaches the subject through abstraction and sensory pacing. The project unfolds through a series of interconnected components:
- Abstract oil paintings
- A companion book
- Poetic plaques created through collaboration with AI
- A virtual gallery experience
- Sound and spatial design elements
Together, these elements create a meditative environment that echoes the fragmented and shifting qualities of memory associated with Alzheimer’s. The viewer moves through emotional thresholds that mirror Sisco’s personal journey: moments of clarity, gentle fading, and the quiet persistence of love. The exhibition becomes less a linear story and more an emotional landscape shaped by atmosphere, rhythm, and reflection.
Materiality as Memory
Sisco’s surfaces act as metaphors for the ways memories are formed, altered, and recalled. Layers of paint are built up and removed, hinting at what once was and what is now obscured. Translucent passages sit beside dense opacity. Gestural marks are softened by erasure. These shifts suggest the porousness of time and the fluid nature of perception.
By allowing traces of earlier layers to remain visible, Sisco creates an active visual history within each work. The viewer encounters both presence and absence simultaneously, much like the experience of recalling something that no longer feels entirely whole. Her material decisions echo the emotional terrain she explores: what remains, what disappears, and what continues to resonate long after the original moment has faded.
Artwork Spotlight: The Light Was Different That Day
One of the works that captures the core of Sisco’s inquiry is The Light Was Different That Day. The painting evokes a moment that feels both familiar and transformed, as if a subtle change in light has altered the emotional register of an entire memory. Layers of paint reveal gestures that rise and dissolve, creating an atmosphere suspended between clarity and diffusion.
The title suggests a shift in perception, a moment when something intangible has changed. The work embodies Sisco’s interest in the ephemeral and the emotional impact of small transitions. It stands as a gentle reminder that memory is shaped not only by events but by the light, mood, and feeling that surround them.
Conclusion
Deborah Sisco’s art offers a compassionate exploration of what it means to remember, to lose, and to love through uncertainty. Her work does not seek resolution but invites viewers into spaces where ambiguity can be experienced as beauty and emotional truth. Through painting, poetic language, and immersive design, she creates environments that deepen our understanding of memory and connection.
Sisco’s practice continues to evolve, yet her commitment remains constant: to create art that honors the complexity of human experience and offers room for reflection. Her paintings remind us that even in stillness, something moves, and even in disappearance, something remains.
