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To experience the inside, outside, is the dominant challenge of Glen Henderson's work. Over recent years she has created a range of objects, images and performance installations that, although varied in format, continue to explore the relationship between that which is seen, the surface of things, and that which is felt, the heart of the matter. Running across this dominant, intuitively driven, assumption that exposure of the inner core reveals truth, is the intelligent mind, analytic process and exploration of analysis itself, all combined in an attempt to construct meaning.
Henderson's sculptural objects are typically body-part sized, built up from layers of blood red wax, a translucent material that achieves a surface glow that would be the envy of both the beautician and the mortician.
A work described by the artist as 'flesh wounds' is emblematic of a chest and pelvis. Typical of works in this series, it is at once exhibited flat on a wall, and at the same time displays a dominant sculptural form and surface. This offering of layers of alternate types of representation, between the two dimensional and three dimensional, provides an irresolvable yet seductive arena in which the works are experienced. As a result of this condition of perpetual ambiguity, the viewer thus suspended, readily samples the range of symbolic meanings Henderson implants in the works. The red torso bulges with organs, contained only by a linear grid that acts more to classify their degree of vulnerability than to provide a supporting cage of ribs. Exposed and vulnerable, the directness and hence potential banality of this flaunting of the body is ultimately brought to check by the economy of means of the work, by its