Mary Henderson

Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Artist statement

This body of work is the latest iteration of a multi-year project centered on impromptu portraits of people in public spaces, seen in unguarded instances of personal connection or synchronicity. The paintings are about the connections between people, and the ways we affect each other – knowingly and unknowingly, positively and negatively – when we gather together. Although I have always been uncomfortable in dense crowds, I am also moved by the ways they support, at one end, small moments of intimate connection between strangers and, at the other end, large-scale expressions of collective identity and solidarity. My work is inspired by the traditions of urban genre painting and street photography that attempt to capture the spontaneous poetry of the everyday. I work mostly from photos I have taken of people in groups at large public events – protests, amusement parks, concerts – although I sometimes use found imagery that resonates with my personal experience. It is important to me not to approach any group entirely as an outsider, so I try to work within the boundaries of my own experience, using images from places I have been or would feel comfortable going to. I remove the majority of external context and identifying information in order to draw the viewer’s attention to expressions and gestures, rather than to social signifiers. My palette is saturated and largely invented, and is based on a combination of intuition and color theory to convey a mood or aura. Because I...

Artwork