DEBORAH LERNER

Particular Ideas is pleased to announce Corrugated Leaf, a six-layer screen print by Deborah Lerner, hand-finished with stickers and produced in close collaboration with master printer Ian Wilkinson.

Every studio collects its own archive. For Lerner there is no better object to reflect this idea than the piece of glass which has acted as her palette for the past three years. This surface bears the history of all the canvases it has served, and the print begins with a monoprint pulled directly from it. On the lower third of the finished work, you can see the accumulated scratches alongside additional forms created by disused packaging that was pressed into the inked-up plate.

What follows is a story of process discovering itself. The monoprint was exposed at three separate levels, creating three separate screens that were then printed in gradually shifting colours; a technique Ian Wilkinson had not previously used and one that arrived unplanned, out of experimentation and collaboration in the print workshop. A fourth screen, drawn from a bubble-wrap monoprint, supplies the movement to the work's blue ground and enables the print to carry two distinct methods of mark-making, both of which are connected to objects normally thrown away.

Over this composition, Lerner hand finishes with a constellation of stickers, lending the surface a geometric counterweight to its gestural depths. It is a device she returns to often and one that can be traced back to a work by Prunella Clough that she saw at the British Museum back in 2023. Fittingly, it was Clough who brought her together with Ian, who worked with the artist from 1993 until her death in 1999. To coincide with the release, Deborah spoke with Ian Wilkinson about the printing, process and happy accidents; please see the link here to the interview and images from the printing studio.

Deborah Lerner (b. 1989) is an English painter based in London. She graduated with a BA from Camberwell College of Art in 2023, participated in the inaugural Apollo Painting School in 2024 and was selected for the 2025/26 cohort of New Contemporaries. For the past 3 years she has been travelling round the UK visiting public collections that contain work by the artist Prunella Clough. Lerner will open her solo exhibition at Permanent Location, London in November 2026.