Untitled #16, 2011-12
LS SH157 N3B
archival inkjet pigment print
127 x 180 cm
Edition of 5 + AP 2

In this enigmatic photographic image from 2011-2012, we witness a young male slouched, head tilted to look over his shoulder. With ephemeral light shedding onto the boy's wet hair, and with his eyes seemingly sedated, we question his state of consciousness. He, in an intensely interior and undecipherable environment, represents our inability to remove him from his seemingly frightening reality – his body becomes representational of withheld information. Where is he? What has he been doing and what next? The adolescent has been arrested by the space that surrounds him.


"The manner in which we sense temperature, gravity, velocity, humidity and the profound effect these and other forces have upon our conscious and unconscious body, have always been at the centre of creative endeavour," said Henson.


Henson's work doesn't try to be beautiful, it tries to be true. The artist's images are paralysing because the adolescents in them offer an intense conditioning of humanity. The subjects of Henson's photographs are seemingly displaced, they are lost and searching for something beyond our current time and place. Beneath the photographic surface there lies a striking emptiness and hollow spiritual hope as the haunting bodies in front of us quality a dark reality. There is a loss of innocence both within Henson's work and outside it, as audiences recognise a twisted euphoria.

Menu close