↳ Exhibitions

Tamara Henderson at Rodeo

July 17, 2017

Artist: Tamara Henderson

Exhibition title: Seasons End: Panting Healer

Venue: Rodeo, London, UK

Date: May 17 – July 29, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Rodeo, London

“How Can It Be Described? How Can Any of it Be Described? The Trip and The Story of the Trip Are Two Different Things”
Gideon Lewis Krauss, A Sense of Direction

Rodeo is very happy to present the second exhibition at the gallery by Tamara Henderson (b. Canada, 1982).

Seasons End landed for the first time in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library in 2016 as part of Glasgow International. In a grand reading room, a gargantuan figure made of foliage as well as fluffy souvenirs from Loch Ness and upholstered lumps was dominating the space while actively photographing with her pinhole camera. The photos were being developed in the dark room that was composed of six figures made of scratched developing film. Surrounded by twenty-four figures (as many as the day’s hours) the Garden Photographer was gathering moments of the times in the hall of the library, night and day. Material assembled while travelling through places surrounded by water, plants and roots and seaweed as well as packages from Turkish coffee, leaves, nutshells and little things one puts in the pocket while wandering. The figures, constant travellers, are nomads in flux; gatherers of stories and memories, carriers of maps and postcards, things that stay in the bottom of the bags when in transit. The pocket is a holy shrine and not a storage space, but a memory womb where things are kept away from real time forever.

How does architecture affect life? This time in Los Angeles, Seasons End: Panting Healer finds the Photographer in recline, a nursing figure on her side feeding her ivy; matter in transit and transformation. Everyone changes when travelling.

Now back in London, the assembly of the Hours in Rodeo’s space feels like a return to a domesticity that allowed the forms to be born in the first place; in Tamara’s words, a return home and wearing your teenage clothes that don’t really fit, this endless disagreement with time. Using Istanbul as a base and via a complex route of flights and luggage allowance diplomacy, the sculptures and the fabrics contain knowledge and wisdom d ifficult for an artwork to carry.

The paintings are also the result of migratory forces as the mashed paper framing them comes from elsewhere and the sense of economy rises up again as one of the traveller’s biggest wisdoms. Reflecting Henderson’s daily drawing practice, one that has replaced the act of writing, the paintings become linguistic plates that open like windows in the stream of the unconscious, leaving all paths ahead possible for us to take.

A coming iteration of a next transformation of this body of work, after the Garden Photographer’s cremation on the shores of California, will appear in Hyde Park on 21 July as pa rt of Park Nights, hosted by the Serpentine Gallery. As seasons change we change with them.