These candles for sale at Rachael Henson’s studio last week represent the artist’s sensibilities around religious iconography and sexuality.
Rachael Henson brought something seriously playful to Dallas.
A row of candles shaped like hands with fingers crossed toward the ceiling as if hoping or planning a trick. The wax flesh comes in sugar-sick light blue and other queasy colors. Between each set of two almond-shaped nails is a wick. Some candles are molded like open mouths with wicks hanging out (except the one mouth with a ball gag; for that one, the wick flops out of the ball.)
They all look a little melted already and aware of their campiness, perhaps made by someone well-versed in Spirit Halloween’s weekday hours and Julia Kristeva’s philosophy of abjection. One of these fingers-crossed candles would not be out of place on Gabriette’s coffee table and the kind of find that would sell out at any market in East Los Angeles. Takeaway hits aren’t the focus of artist Rachael Henson’s work; the candles are an afterthought. This is just her casual moving sale during Odyssey Studios’ recent open house. Here it’s easy to see the direct line Henson could take to demi-goth-girl art stardom: drippy shapes cover the shelves, an errant rib cage grabs attention, and mold grows under glass like a half-nuked landscape that Henson says she’ll have to destroy with bleach before she moves to Philadelphia for grad school.
What visitors see in the studio doesn’t let on to Henson’s complex practice. Exacting scents of such delights as blood and fungus — and tastes that have included cantaloupe juice with red wine simple syrup — are often central to her installations, which are not the kind you drop off at galleries a week before an opening. In 2018, she made her first edible photographs with a process that involves transferring images with edible ink onto materials like gelatin (now Henson uses agar, which is vegan) and letting gallery-goers taste the pictures on the show’s opening night. Visitors to El Centro in 2022 for Tender Conditions took a provided spoon. Each sample created a redaction. One person chose to remove the eyes from an image of the artist’s family members. After every participant got a taste, Henson sealed the ravaged, perishable photographs and let nature take its course for the remainder of the show’s run. The artist learned that the material should always be backed with something before it’s hung on a wall lest spores take over a gallery.
Now she encases the images in glass instead of plastic and leaves room for mold to swell. The soldered cases add another layer to the soft gore in her work — they’re like clear coffins for organisms that remain very much alive. A false ending; another trick.
The edible photograph Mother Wound from 2022 is shown here after gallery-goers had a taste, and then later in a state of decay. Rachael Henson’s family often shows up in her work. Her mother is from war-torn Myanmar where her grandfather was a candy maker.
Following Henson’s art over the past few years has taken me to exciting venues for the first time. This was often because the space where she was showing her work had just opened. The building that houses Oak Cliff Assembly wasn’t even finished when she installed a creaturely stained-glass piece there for the supergroup show Limbo in November 2022. Most recently, I found myself in sweltering heat at Fetid, a production of emerging curator Jillian Wendel whose Shed Show projects take place in an actual shed behind a house in Denton. Henson’s piece was a jelly lamb-shaped night light plugged into an outlet. (The shed has an outlet, I thought. Handy.) It turns out the outlet was fake and the light was self-sustaining, which called attention to the bare-bones nature of the venue and the insistence of all the works to be there anyway.
Rachael Henson’s experiments often strip away the use of objects and subvert rituals. Here in her corner at Odyssey Studios, a back scratcher and its duplicate cause the viewer to think about power, punishment, what gives the material a sense of humor, and our collective addiction to convenience.
Back at Odyssey last week, I looked at a wooden back scratcher and its flaccid replica made with agar. Rachael lays them side-by-side so I can take a photo. The gummed version was funny when it flopped over her wrist, mocking the supposed usefulness of its counterpart. On the table, it’s a dead prop. It occurs to me how the wooden back scratcher could also be used as a paddle, that creepy, domestic, maybe sexual weapon, and how its limp, innocuous-seeming twin is disarming.
Rachael Henson’s work will be featured at Dallas Contemporary’s staff exhibition, which opens July 11th.
