Glen Henderson
My footsteps make this place familiar to me as they repeat and retrace the pathways which form my journeys, connecting sites and sights in the city. it is busy and bare, ordered and disordered, fragmented and cohesive. In this place of contradictions, I find my bearings through the familiar only to realise that it is a// too familiar. Strange, uncanny, [un]heimlich.
In Glen Henderson's Mapping the Substance, that familiar and contradictory urban environment is stripped into modular architectural features and distilled into minimal sculptural works. These sculptures do not act through simulation, but as metonym and diagram, forming both a symbolic relationship with the exterior and a spatial relationship within the interior. They come to signify their reducible worlds. In this systematic reduction, Henderson presents a matrix of suggestive details by which we experience both orientation and disorientation.
The architecture shifts from the exterior to an interior which is white and silent and still. Is this inside-out or outside-in? This arrangement, however, is not a simple reversal but a re-routing of knowledges grounded in experience; this reducibility of the city reveals the irreducibility of the body. As Maurice Merleau Ponty contends, the body is the continual site of return and experience. Situated in dialogue with the world, the body speaks of the world and the world speaks through the body.1
In the city the body is lost until it finds its way or finds its fit, pressing onward, somehow reflected in and imprinted on the surfaces which surround it, us. From the spaces in which we are dwarfed, we extract and reference fragments, details by which we come to know our places and ourselves. I would like to