Tamara Henderson

The practice of Tamara Henderson (1982, Sackville, Canada) covers a wide variety of mediums, such as performance, painting, poetry, film, textiles, sculpture and installation that can incorporate found object. Her work often departs from an open-ended investigation on different states of consciousness. While the notes, observations, patterns or ideas that she includes in her work might be derived from what she sees in her everyday life, Henderson then elaborates them in order to compose a kind of oneiric mythology that she further complexifies through different filters of perception. A key aspect of her work is thus the transformative power that is generated by the energy between the conscious and the unconscious. 

 Some of her works might verge to the funny, others to the openly arcane or indecipherable, subverting the boundaries between inside and outside, both in her own body and in those of visitors. Despite the fact that the human figure is largely absent from her work, it does offer a possibility to reconnect with the body, to the idea of what a body is, should or can be. Objects  replace human figures and become characters that spiral into being through  their own dreamy, meditative, narrative journeys: by sewing dilated pupils on a set of curtains, for example, the artist turns them into eyewitnesses or observers. In other series of works, the artist creates animistic, hallucinatory scenes by revisiting a wide range of techniques borrowed from the early years of cinema or the avant-garde of theatre and performance.

Support: Canada Council for the Arts