Paul Henderson

“I’m ultimately interested in developing a unique visual language and approach to collage by combining a wide range of graphic elements with images from art history, medical textbooks, religious ephemera, magazines, and junk mail. I try to create visually dynamic works, held together by tensions between surface pattern, graphic elements, abstraction and traditional pictorial illusion. I’m guided by intuition and curiosity and let ideas emerge through the making, remaining open to possibilities and chance juxtapositions to create interesting visual relationships and develop meaning. Through my process and synthesis of disparate source material, I try to create strange and lyrical images that are simultaneously critical, ambiguous, humorous, poetic, and visually dynamic.

I love the physicality and immediacy of collage, and I love the infinite possibilities and permutations the medium allows. It has provided me a way into the joyful process of picture making, to generative solitary craft, and to the slow meandering of the interior conscious and unconscious mind. I’m thankful to have the space and time to make things, to have an active creative role in my life, and to have the opportunity to engage with community and audience.”