The train departs from Amsterdam, heading towards a place where the horizon seems only the beginning. Right in front of me is a young woman seated. She’s going home. Her bag full. A thick book on her lap. She reads. She looks outside. Smiling at a girl who asks her name. “Debora. Deb”, she says. “Deb” repeats the girl and hops to her seat.
Debora van der Vliet is a visual artist and the founder of Liminal Expressionism, a practice that explores how the self appears, dissolves and resonates within space. Her work lives in the liminal zone between body, environment and consciousness: the in-between moments where who we are is still taking shape.
She believes identity is fluid. No one is one thing forever, not the artist, not the viewer, not the work. What feels like being stuck is often something quietly shifting. Her work stays in that moment of transition: a body caught in a mirror, a man asleep, a self that is there and not quite there.
Liminal Expressionism grew from a refusal to wait for permission. The art world often teaches artists to depend on others to decide what matters, and teaches buyers to doubt their own taste. Van der Vliet doesn’t believe either story.
What matters most to her is the connection between the work and the person who feels it. She collaborates with galleries and spaces that strengthen that connection rather than stand in its way.
She knows her collectors and talks to them. She values her work from what it means and what it takes to keep creating. She shows where it makes sense: a gallery, a studio, a greenhouse, a living room, a space that didn’t exist last month. And she shares her process openly, doubts and contradictions included, as proof that the work comes from a real place.
If something in her work moves you, trust that feeling. You don’t need anyone to tell you it’s good. You’ve always known.
Liminal Expressionism started with one artist who refused to wait. Now it’s a living movement, and you’re welcome in it.
‘Deb, Deb, Deb, Deb, Deb, Deb, Deb, Deb’, the girl repeats.