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Nigel Henderson
Outside In: Step Up Workshop Pack - Part 2
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.
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
Jean Dubuffet
N
igel 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
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.
Dolly Sen looking at Nigel Henderson’s
work in the library at Pallant House Gallery
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 selfportraits, each showing something about me I have not seen before.
The head is a strange place indeed.
Dolly Sen, Self-Portrait
Max Ernst, Cahiers d’Art
no. 6-7, Paris, 1936.
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