Nigel Henderson11Outside In: Step Up Workshop Pack - Part 2

Two Panels taken from 4 Mural Panels (Screen), Nigel Henderson, 1949-52 and 1960, collage, oil paint and photographic processes on wood panel, Pallant House Gallery Wilson Gift through the Art Fund, 2004 © The Estate of Nigel Henderson

This workshop pack was produced by artist Dolly Sen as a result of her research into the life and art of Nigel Henderson. It is to be used in conjunction with Nigel Henderson Outside In Workshop Pack Part 1.

Jean Dubuffet

Nigel Henderson benefitted from friendships with a number of artists including Dubuffet and key Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Henderson and Dubuffet shared an appreciation

of each other’s work. In 1978, Henderson reflected on photographs taken during his years living in the East End of London and observed connections between his work and Dubuffet’s aesthetic of rawness and improvisation. The similarities in the collage works of Henderson and Dubuffet are also notable.

Jean Dubuffet, Cheveux de Sylvain, 1953, collage with butterfly wings on board, Fondation Dubuffet, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

You can use this outline of a head as a guideline or template for your collage.

The Head is a Strange Place: Reflecting on Nigel Henderson

Dolly Sen, Self-Portrait

I was drawn to the work of Nigel Henderson. I viewed Henderson’s print Head of James Joyce in the library at Pallant House Gallery,

but prior to that, it was Henderson’s piece, The Head of a Man (1956) at Tate Britain, which snared my attention for several reasons: one, it looked like William Burroughs, a writer I admire; two, I had recently been creating collages for the first time; and three, he used cold, rocky, impersonal photos of a desolate landscape to create the beautiful, haunted individuality of a face.

The more I read into Henderson’s life story, the more I saw that he was always trying to rearrange reality and push its intractable boundaries, not only in his art, but in his life too. Psychiatry did little to help and he used his art as a stabilising influence. This is very close to my own experience. Mental health services did me more harm than good; it is my art that has saved me. I think us outsiders move around torn pieces of reality to shape something that is more meaningful to us.

My previous collages made real the rare possibility for others to hear the voices and see the visions of my psychosis. Psychosis seems to me to be a collage of the cutting outs of reality, where the source material isn’t Woman’s Weekly magazine, but the complex human being. It echoes what Max Ernst said about collage: “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit.” 1

I created a self-portrait using the method in The Head of a Man. There are no deserts or mountains around me, but there is the personal landscape of my hometown Streatham in South London.

I have watched time pass in this town and the lines it has made on my face – that much I see in my collage. But my collage hides me well, obscuring me behind walls. What this art piece has shown me is that the walls around me do not make me. I am not here and you are not there. My hometown will be here after I am gone. I am a ghost that has provided flesh and dreams for shadows.

Every piece of art I create tells me another truth, even in the detritus of broken photographs. I could make endless collage self-portraits, each showing something about me I have not seen before. The head is a strange place indeed.

1 Max Ernst, Cahiers d’Art no. 6-7, Paris, 1936.

Dolly Sen looking at Nigel Henderson’s work in the library at Pallant House Gallery