Deacon has followed an unconventional career path but, as it turns out, he had been laying, if unwittingly, a solid foundation for his eventual turn to sculpture. He started with a degree in architecture at the University of Toronto, graduating with the RAIC Medal.  A short time working in the profession followed but he found his interests gravitating to the smaller scale elements of architecture- more about materials, details, the feel of things, rather than the larger scale issues and elements.

This led to a shift to furniture design, primarily chairs, primarily for large scale production.  Chairs can be seen as a counter-form to the sitter but they also often have an anthropomorphic quality themselves, think arms, legs, feet, back.  This led to a language of form in Deacon’s furniture work drawing inspiration from the natural world where physics and function are the generating principals rather than personal expression or conceptual propositions.  The result is almost inescapably a sense of ease and inevitability in the work, of things being at home in their own skin, a sense of grace.

In 2001 Deacon began a hiatus from the design world spent mostly at a property in the Mulmur Hills exploring ideas bringing together sculpture, garden making and larger interventions in the landscape and investigating issues of the relationship between physics and spirituality, between the micro and the macro and the history of garden making.

In 2006 he built a studio and beginning in 2019 devoted himself full time to his current art practice, splitting his time between Toronto and Mulmur.  He soon began developing techniques and approaches that upend conventions of making in his chosen material palette following an iterative process similar to how vernacular form emerges over time and how evolution in the natural world both enriches and refines.

The objects that Deacon creates are characterized by layers of ambiguity and paradox, evoking such juxtapositions as artefact and organism, fullness and emptiness,  intention and accident, trauma and healing, death and rebirth.  The results are both beautiful and unsettling.