拍品專文
"Russell's paintings expose the intimate relationship humans have contrived with nature when enclosing space and organising the landscape for reasons of function or recreation. In these works we recognise that the cultivated garden 'has acquired certain ambiguities as a place in which nature and culture, work and pleasure meet.' Russell's gardens and scenes of agricultural artifacts explore this ambiguity through subject matter which ranges from the poignant and intimate to the deeply absurd and fictional. The uncertainty of intention provoked by Russell's depictions is intensified by a strategy of exaggeration. The paintings' trend towards caricature or cartoon locates the works a little closer towards the hyper-real and further away from the 'innoccence' of realism. This heightened state is enhanced by employment of bold, not-quite-realistic colour palettes. In many works the boundary between the vegetal and the architectural is blurred..." (J. Shepherd, "I never promised you a rose garden: the art of Deborah Russell", Art and Australia, vol. 34, no. 3, 1997, p. 345)