Lee Henderson

work focuses on understanding problems, with an awareness that the work of the artist lies in revealing false problems rather than solving real ones. Through his process he latches onto a piece of material, or a historical factoid, or the cultural baggage of an object, or a quirk of language, and becomes fascinated – obsessed until is reveals the mortal banality of its associations. Those associations – networks of the human intellectual emotional investment, vulgarly known as “meaning” – then find expression in reconfigurations of light, text, space, sound, and matter.

His residency project will centre around a quirk of history. 1492, a year practically synonymous with colonial expansionism, is the same year that the Arches paper company was founded in France. Arches paper, since, have been a much-coveted artist’s supply, a way of letting that most bourgeois-democratic of materials (printing paper) connote the luxury and opulence of European imperial-ecclesiastical power; paper more generally ties itself to colonial power as the map that charts the territory, and the constant “proof” of ownership.