Tamara Henderson | Womb Life

About

At 10 am on Sunday, May 27, 2018 in a Tokyo-style hotel room capsule, the artist had an impromptu hypnotherapy session with the hypnotist Marcos Lutyens. The written account by Lutyens tells us that an inward-leading progression took place: “(…) into the mud, the clay, the slip. Dissolving downwards into the loam with an x-ray view of time and space and body.”

Tamara Henderson’s process of creation develops its own mythology out of an ongoing practice of writing, drawing, and making notations of everyday objects. She registers patterns in objects and atmospheric phenomena and protocols their appearance in dreams in order to expand conventional registers of consciousness. The hypnosis session at Gatwick Airport made way for a multitude of resulting evolutions that would eventually become the work for the exhibition—born from the language of the mud, matured in the body of the artist, decoded by the umbilical chord, and finally grounded by the pulse of the placenta.

The artist works through an instinctive approach. Here, inanimate objects often become implicated in the act of storytelling as they shape-shift their way across different bodies of work, time zones, and spaces. For KW, Henderson presents her new film Womb Life—for which the exhibition space is transformed into an underground cinema. The film is accompanied by a group of eight characters masked as performative items of furniture and equipped with intrinsic instructions for the willing participant. The windows, shrouded in custom-made curtains, create a theatre space that breathes the lights on and off, allowing the visitors to encounter the furniture as sculptures at times while the film is inactive.