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Spiritual and Dream is dominated by its physicality. Glen Henderson's painted carved reliefs have a startling visual impact which call to mind ancient Greek friezes, hieroglyphs, tableaux, fossils. These references may be associative but they are deliberate. 1t is an exhibition based on an "art of inclusion "1 with a wide art historical embrace of archaic forms and pre-existent images. The artist is cast as archaeologist. The subject matter of the exhibition is not explicit, but like the archaeological artist, the viewer is invited to decipher signs and markings which are at once intensely familiar and deliberately estranging. Cultural icons, both contemporary and ancient are woven into an overriding aesthetic of form which homogenises and excludes. The forms speak to each other lucidly but their content remains, to us, elusive.
Of course, the strategy of using elusive content caught self-referentially within an insignia aesthetic is the coup of modernism and the ideal vehicle for calling upon the sub-textual primitive, the subconscious dream and the 'spiritual '. However, Glen Henderson's art, while happily falling within a modernist tradition, also attempts to supersede it. This she does, not through a process of deconstruction, but through a more positive attempt at redefinition. Spiritual and Dream affirms the concepts of spirituality and primitivism while also seeking to redefine them.
Henderson 's primitive references are not based on the ethnocentric construct of the art object versus artefact (images of African masks, totem poles, etc.). Rather, the carved wooden reliefs are equally as suggestive of classical friezes as of tribal ceremony and seem to refer to cultural heritage rather than the exotic 'other'. Henderson's work is more concerned with reinvesting tribal sacredness into contemporary culture than