Nicole Debono works in painting, with a practice that moves between memory, embodiment and the unstable boundary between what is visible and what is withheld. Her compositions are framed through tightly cropped views, interiors and immediate surroundings, lending ordinary objects an existential and symbolic weight. The familiar is rarely permitted to remain neutral; it becomes a vessel for projection and emotional residue. Her work positions the female experience at its centre, approaching the domestic not as backdrop but as an active structure through which psychic and social tensions are staged.

In 2026, Debono presented Visions Are Seldom What They Seem, a solo exhibition of twenty-eight works curated by Rachelle Bezzina at the Malta Society of Arts, Palazzo de La Salle, Valletta. The show gathered paintings made between 2024 and 2026 around the figure of the shadow: hands that cast the shapes of animals, string games played between two people, bodies caught between innocence and experience, agency and restraint. It continued the interest in interiority and psychological space first articulated in her debut solo exhibition, Lost in the Ether (2022).

Debono's process is rooted in the gathering and reconfiguration of visual references drawn from personal archives, studio observation, art history, symbolic imagery and the body in contemporary culture. She works in oil on wood panel, linen and cotton paper, building layered allegorical images that investigate how memory is distorted, edited, protected and performed over time. Titles are drawn from idiom, folklore and her own reading, reflecting an ongoing interest in how language structures images and meaning.

Debono has since exhibited in Malta, Gibraltar, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. In 2024 she received the KBIC x ARTZ ID Studio Space Award from Malta Enterprise and ARTZ ID. In 2025 she exhibited with the Cane-Yo collective at Copeland Gallery, London, and in 2026 in Berlin and Paris.