Alicia Henry: To Whom It May Concern

Alicia Henry’s compositions show representations of unidentifiable individuals and groups of people based on a range of composite references including but not limited by her own memories, African masks, paper-dolls, European clowning traditions, American minstrelsy and everyday life and events. These figures appear frequently atomised and often itemised. Eyes become empty sockets or sometimes droop, limbs feature voids and faces are visibly sutured, absent, or blank of expression – all alluding to physical pain and psychological trauma. At the same time, these figures generate deliberate presence moving the eye across the figure through formal exercises in colour, line, and material. In the past, these faces and bodies have been marked by pastels; cut out to form abstracted components; outlined by thread and yarn; bound together with swatches of textiles – all part of artist’s strategy to ‘make visible that which still often goes unseen’. 

She begins by making preparatory drawings in her home studio in Nashville. After completing her sketches, she begins working across an array of materials which in the past have included cotton, felt, leather, canvas, cotton, wool, linen, plastic to name but a few. The choice of material will change according to which medium Henry deems best suited to the work at hand. Her treatment of these materials lends the work its emotive quality. In the past, when she has used leather, she processes the textile by staining, dyeing, and boiling, a labour-intensive act – each outcome is different to the last. She also employs several other techniques to make her representations including painting, collage, and needlework. 

As her enigmatic, graceful figures assert their gaze, Henry’s tragicomical work negotiates a space between spectacle, performance and testimony exploring how identity, family, gender, community, and societal differences play out in the real world and register their complexities and contradictions on the body.