Deborah Graziano (b. 1988, Italy) lives and works between Castrovillari and Milan. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2012, she decided to devote herself entirely to her artistic practice. Her research finds its principal language in sculpture and continually navigates the boundary between intuition and rigour. Her work explores themes ranging from the fragility of human existence to the search for identity and belonging, examining the contradictions and nuances of lived experience in an attempt to recompose them into a sense of unity.
 
She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including RDV N°2 (2026), curated by Bianca d’Ippolito and Michela Rossetti, private apartment, Milan; It’s Out of Love (2025), Viafarini in residence, Milan; Spazio Liminale (2024), Villa Guicciardini, Prato; Aquarium (2023), former prison, Castrovillari (CS); Per difetto (2022), curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, Castello Aragonese, Castrovillari (CS); Sanatorium (2021), curated by Sara Maietta, former Military Artillery Academy, Turin; and Amor Vacui (2020), Museo del Presente, Rende (CS). In 2026, she was selected as one of the artists in the seventeenth edition of the Combat Prize. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Exibart Prize, while in 2019 she received the Best N.I.C.E. Artist Award and was named among Paratissima Turin’s 15 Best Artists.
 
We can surrender ourselves to the current, to every gust of wind, to any force that threatens to throw us off balance; or we can respond with determination and adaptability, following the undulating movement of life’s challenges without ever breaking. Through the Lay series, Deborah Graziano reflects on resilience through the metaphor of seaweed, a primordial organism whose existence is defined by its continuous relationship with the forces that pass through it, and which finds in flexibility its principal strategy for survival. Translating this organism into lead creates a paradox that is both material and symbolic: the lightness and elegance of seaweed are confronted with a dense material, laden with memory, history and sedimentation, giving rise to an image suspended between vitality and permanence. The work emerges from the encounter between two apparently irreconcilable logics: on the one hand, the biological logic of adaptation, continuous transformation and interdependence with the environment; on the other, that of mineral matter, which evokes weight, stability and endurance.
 
In Lay, resilience becomes the ability to inhabit complexity. Seaweed does not resist the current with an equal and opposing force; it moves through it, absorbs its energy and continually redefines its own form. Graziano translates this dynamic into the language of sculpture, transforming the act of adaptation into a condition of critical permanence, in which weight does not hinder movement but becomes its measure. It is precisely the paradox of seaweed cast in lead that reveals how every state of equilibrium results from a continuous negotiation between opposing forces.
 
The series therefore invites us to move beyond the opposition between fragility and strength. These two conditions are not mutually exclusive; rather, they coexist within a material that bears the marks of the pressures it has endured and which, precisely for this reason, continues to generate new possibilities of form.
 
Text by Erica Massaccesi