Deborah began working with the dress form in graduate school, where she developed her interest in representations of memory, which is the conceptual basis for most of her work. The large scale dess forms, mostly 3/4 life scale, present narratives of personal , familial, historical and cultural memory: a taxonomy of memory. The sculptures are one of a kind, coil built, and carved in sections which are reassembled after firing. After two shoulder replacements Deborah no longer makes these larger ceramic pieces, which are all in public or private collections.