Tamara Henderson

I first came across your work through your films. What struck me immediately was their tactile quality, how sculptural they feel, as though you’ve constructed a world. That world can take on a dream logic, however I don’t experience the films as strictly surrealist. The camera may move through what looks like a dream atmosphere, but the films might be doing something else at the same time. In the same breath, there’s a strong desire to peer into the matter of things, with hands or objects reaching out, textures insisting on being touched. There’s also a diaristic quality to some of your later films, a sense of taking the camera with you as you move through the world, as a way of thinking and feeling in transit. Of course, the films aren’t all the same, but I’m curious how you would describe them overall. How do you understand your method of working? What has changed, what has adapted to different conditions of making? 

Tamara Henderson. The body of the camera, it is an extension of my own body. The 16mm Bolex I shoot on is spring-loaded. It holds 30 seconds of pressure in its mechanism. Unlike my brian, this body can allow light to pass through it onto film, creating a perceivable memory that can be shared. Each roll of Kodak Colour Vision is 100 feet, three minutes long, a spiral of time.

In my earlier films, I would wring out that spiral through choreographies of objects, objects, place, space. Hand-holding the camera, allowing it to move as an extension of my body. While some early films like Sloshed Ballot Anonymous Loan translated actual dreams into performed sequences, communicating vessels between sleep and waking consciousness, there is a cinematic non-linearity that emerges from everyday life. The objects themselves become portals, thresholds, offering themselves as elsewheres that exist in front of the lens.

What has changed is where the structure lives. In earlier films, I built structures inside the camera, thinking in terms of the 3-minute spiral, choreographing sequences, cutting on motion and building in transition/continuity through panning, zooming in, motion. The pursuit was continuity, progression, and later, working collaboratively on Bottles Under the Influence, Consider the Belvedere collaboratively with Kasper Feyrer, and on longer films of mine: Seasons End: Out of Body and Green in the Grooves, Womb Life, I started to use the camera to collect. The structure moved outside the camera into editing, allowing me to connect scenes and objects, lighting situations, place, like a collapse of geographical and temporal distances, a waterfall in Chile with a rock in Nova Scotia.

AW. I saw your show at KW, and what stayed with me was the decision to construct viewing stations. It didn’t feel sufficient to simply project the work onto a wall. The films seemed to demand a more eccentric and situated form of looking. Those stations echo back into the work itself and into the title, Womb Life, shaping a kind of enclosed space for viewing. It feels as though this folds back into the world-making quality of the films, where the act of looking becomes part of the work’s internal logic.

TH. At KW in 2028, I exhibited 5 furniture sculptures, and the 16mm film transferred to digital, on 5 monitors: Language of Mud, Sunspider, Nomad, Sound Shepard, and SammaArahung. The large-scale sculptures (in the film at KW, not present physically) had specific functions built into them. Sound Shepard was a sound room that morphed into a large figure who mic-ed the room and Language of Mud. Language of Mud was a ceramic figure fountain, its lever pulled and pumped by Samma Arahung, a spinning ball with two feet. Nomad was a series of yew boxes that transported Language of Mud, and Sunspider was an eight-limbed kinetic light sculpture with a mirrored core.

The 16mm film was structured in a character order and witnessed the emergence and evolution of each character in their kinetic and furniture form, as well as their influences in coming to be. The structure of the film can be a growth process.

Interestingly, I was pregnant with my daughter Caper at the time of making all of these works, and I was experiencing two-bodiness physiologically: another body inside of my body. Two brains, two heartbeats, two noses, four eyes, two mouths, etc. I think that influenced the decision to have one sculpture self watching another sculpture self, existing in different forms simultaneously. It was a unique time period in my life.

AW. I wanted to ask about your sculptures. They’re eccentric and polymorphous, sometimes abstract, but there’s also a strong sense of technical fabrication running through them. Sometimes they even work, performing a small task (consider the rotating compost machines holding dirt in Green in the Grooves). How do you think about your sculptural process in relation to this eccentric quality? What kind of sculptural imagination is at play as you construct these works?

TH. I’m not really on a pursuit of eccentricity. I guess that quality of the work, it arrives through process.

I studied at NSCAD toward an interdisciplinary degree: sculpture, film, textiles, sound, performance. One exercise stays with me from Rita Makeough's time-based media class in 2000.

She had a reel-to-reel recorder, and the class stood in a circle, creating loops with the forefinger and thumb around the tape, while the magnetic tape traveled through all the loops and back to the machine. Human body, material, resonance, performativity, all in one gesture. Later, studying with Simon Starling at Städelschule and at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, I extended my sculptural vocabulary while allowing active imagination, dream, hypnotic induction, automatic drawing, these highly condensed generative moments, to have monumental presence in everyday life through sculptural process. The eccentricity comes from translating these fleeting moments through sculptural process, slowing them down, making physical contracts with their forms.

In honoring the animistic properties of sculptures and objects, I imbue some forms with autonomous movement. In Womb Life, Sama Arahung, about cultivating energy and awareness through meditation, gives flow to Language of Mud. They are symbiotic. The compost characters in Green in the Grooves later transformed into figurative costume sculptures at Camden Art Centre, spinning on centrifugal platforms so the film could obtain a 360-degree perspective of what their bodies held. Sun Spider was motorized to provide aberrant light patterns as an eight-limbed entity whose motion could light up the scene.

AW. Building on this discussion of film and sculpture, I’m curious about the figures and archetypes that move through your work. This felt particularly present in your exhibition at the Belkin with the Old Hag, for instance, or the secretary. Some of these seem grounded in research and in particular sites, like the Belvedere Court, where you lived and worked, and its earlier life as a vocational school. Then there was the construction of costumes for Seasons End. Out of Body. Some of these figures appear as though they’re from the realm of science-fiction. For Green in the Grooves, there are those little gnomes (or what looks like gnomes). How do you think about these figures? What work do they do for you, and why do they keep returning?

TH. I see all those characters as vessels that hold their own parts: research, dreams, symbol, experience, witnessed situations, potential scenes. Each one is wired to remember, forget, express. They’re like cognitive systems: what you put into the vessel determines the character’s formation and identity and how it behaves in its ecosystem. The Pest Detective is a good example. It appeared on every page of the Vancouver Yellow Pages: a bug dressed up in a detective coat and hat. The Pest Detective became a bottle. It had an office. The desk was a poem that used Yellow Pages headings in the structure of the poetic endeavour. We carved it, inked it up, printed from it. The desk had a typewriter with seashell keys, and diatomaceous earth describing a labyrinthian pathway around the office. There were stones in the drawers that the detective used to make this powder (crushed seashell).

The Old Hag first emerged through an automatic drawing, research, chemistry session in Stockholm, thick black ink on a page describing this six-limbed vessel form. So, from there, we had a lot of the forms that would become the five bottle characters: Newspaper, Pest Detective, Old Hag, Chance, and Blind. They all feel symbiotic and multifaceted. They are vessels that get filled and distilled into installation elements and scenes, sets, props. They always return and grow, branch because they can transform.

AW.  I’m interested in this strand of experimental work from Vancouver in which the synthesizer functions as an accompanying tool for film and sculptural practice. How does the synthesizer operate in your work, and what does it make possible conceptually or atmospherically?

TH. On most of the film soundtracks, some are optical tracks, others married up through digital means, I worked with Dan Riley, Johan Bjork, and Charlie Knox to develop and compose soundtracks. I am pretty sure that is one of the instruments they facilitate the sound with.

AW. When you were living and working in Vancouver, a key locus of your work was the Belvedere Court. It appears not only as a site where you lived and maintained your studio, but also as the title of a work itself, even though you no longer live there. The building seems to function less as a backdrop than as an active presence in your practice, especially for your collaborative film, Consider the Belvedere.

For decades, the Belvedere Court has been an important part of the city’s artistic life: a place where artists have been able, and in some cases continue to be able, to live and work without being crushed by rent, and where a particular kind of conversation and culture could take shape. You’re part of that history, but so are artists like Rebecca Brewer, Alison Yip, and Kaspar Feyrer, who have lived there, made work there, shot films there, and folded the building itself into their practices. To me, the Belvedere feels as significant to Vancouver as the Slip was to Lower Manhattan in the 1950s, where Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Indiana all had studios, as Prudence Peiffer documents in The Slip (2023).

Could you speak about your relationship to the Belvedere Court? I’m interested not only in its role as a site of production, but in the lived rhythms of the place: the artists who took up residence or passed through, the kinds of encounters it fostered, the community it supported, and the conversations that unfolded in its halls and rooms. Are there particular memories or key encounters that stand out for you? A moment or a story that captures what the Belvedere made possible, and what it has meant for your own work?

TH. Belvedere always reminds me to ask myself: Where am I?

I first experienced the building with Kasper as they were moving in there during one of my Vancouver visits. I was studying in Stockholm, but I would go over there many times to make work with Kasper and live for a short period of time. When we wanted to shoot Consider the Belvedere, room 309 came up for rent, and we wrote a letter, arranged a bottle of rum, and left those to Peter, who maintains the Belvedere. Shortly after that, I got the key to 309.

Moving in was like playing the role of the Pest Detective. The apartment became a film set, the secretary’s office for the film. We moved in all the props for the secretary, who shared some traits with the Old Hag: six limbs, a true bug. Her hands were those hands from the Yellow Pages, “let your fingers do the walking,” and there was a bug bite on her hand. We spritzed the walls and all her props with cochineal, a natural dye derived from the cochineal beetle. It has quite a unique smell, and I remember quite clearly the perfume of the room. The secretary’s body was in the middle of a vortex nest of cables, cords, receipts, notes, pages from The Canadian Secretary (which we found as a reference in the VPL). Everything was sprayed and dripping with cochineal. We had a big pot of the stuff steaming on a hot plate, so it was like that thick condensation. At the end of the shooting day, I would sleep on a mattress beside that vortex in the film set. I’d lived in my studios for years at school, and it felt like home. (lol)

At one stage of the project, we buried a Pest Detective sculpture underneath the sink in the floor when we were “renovating” the kitchen, as a protective gesture to keep the place from having further infestations. After filming Consider the Belvedere, I lived at 309 and made a bar in the Murphy closet, hosted parties and readings, and Tiz brought her painting class one day, which was sweet. Peter also granted us access to the cavernous basement of the building, where the original iron boiler was, like the whole building was constructed around it, the core of the building’s cardiovascular system. We made a cast-iron bottle that we modelled after that boiler.

Peter is a true artist. I always miss him.

AW. Collaboration has also been a major thread in your work in Vancouver. I’m thinking in particular of your collaborations with Kasper and Tiziana. How have these relationships informed your practice? In what ways have they challenged or pushed your work — formally, conceptually, or even in how you think about authorship, about process?

TH. I met Kasper in Frankfurt at Städelschule and have been friends and collaborated many times since then. We made our first 16mm in Stockholm, where I studied after Städelschule, in the middle of winter: Snow, Wax, Shadow. It was a sweet time, a lot of cross-country skiing, watching Orson Welles, and melting wax into the snow. Bottles Under the Influence followed. We started the one-off in the Wine and Spirits Museum in Stockholm, which you see in the film. There is a short scene with the Swamp bottle in a Lithuanian marsh. That led to an exhibition in Banff. We worked with Jesse McKee, that was dreamy, and Mimo at the gallery. We enjoyed our time in Lithuania, visiting a witch/devil sculpture park and the dunes. We made Consider the Belvedere in Vancouver, and Consider the Belvedere we installed at ICA in Philadelphia, and started The Last Waves. We are still working on The Last Waves and looking forward to meeting again in person. Since I’ve been in Australia, we have had a long-distance friendship. It’s almost been a decade. That is the final film in our trilogy. Collaboration feels like a shared language. It may start with conversation, shared reference and witness, and it morphs into the visual realm. Like any relationship, it’s a shared contribution of energy, imagination, support, encouragement, and some kind of cryptic synchronicity with sculpture/plot/image/symbol/ritual.

We maintain so many planes together: the character plane, the subject matter plane, the friendship plane. It’s a very unique and magical thing.

Tiz and I met long-distance. I remember it was at the Spirit of Garfield time. I can’t remember the year exactly. Later, we met in person in Vancouver, and we made 3 Pockets of the Object. Spending time with Tiz is like living a poem, poetry in motion. Energy feels like poetry. The film Shutter feels like a poem, like it’s speaking a poem back at you. A memory that arrives when I think about it is spending time at Exercise when Tiz had a studio there, and she had containers full of collage materials and old Playboys, and we would collage.

And it was so fun. I remember finding this image of a lizard whose nose was smoking, and a big, juicy peach with a film strip rolling by its flesh. I loved the collage that came out of it, and it’s definitely like a Vancouver Madeleine, and the vibe is quite well held in that collage. If there’s an elsewhere I would love to be at any time, it would be hanging out with Kasper and Tiz.

AW. I’m interested in a strand that seems to be developing in your work around ecological awareness, particularly an attention to the undergrowth of nature — worms, bogs, debris, and the dense life that exists below the surface. Although you’re now somewhat distanced from the Vancouver scene, this focus feels locally meaningful, echoing a broader tendency to look toward the forest floor: the understory and the accumulated matter of the natural world. Ecologists describe the understory as the shadowed layer beneath the canopy, where young trees, fungi, insects, and debris form an interdependent system. 

I’ve noticed related tendencies in the work of your contemporaries from Vancouver. Rebecca Brewer’s sottobosco paintings, Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie explored something similar in their sculpture-sound performance, Veils of a Bog at the Western Front in 2018, and I also see it in Steven Hubert’s painting, Snakes Appearing at Dusk (2025). These works seem to register a unique ecological mood: one of insect life humming below the surface. 

What do you feel has led to this development in your work? What do you see as the stakes of this way of working? What does it help clarify about how we understand and visualize nature today? Is there an ethical dimension to this perspective?

TH. In 2021, I moved into a house in Canberra with a yard, and there was a tall compost bin in the yard. One day, I opened the small door at the bottom and was exposed to a beautiful window of decomposition: worms, rot, deep black loam, so much life. I immediately ran to get my Bolex and felt like I was beholding an amazing theater performance. I started listening, mic-ed it up with hydrophones, and made a sound sculpture for Green in the Grooves at Camden Art Centre, running the mics from the internal biophony of the compost to three gates where the viewer could stand and be surrounded in an arch of speakers. The work made me feel like I was buried underground, dead but alive, suspended on a very interesting plane.

I’m a country worm, from a small town on the East Coast, and spent a lot of time living the city worm life. I was happy to reconnect in this way through seed propagation, the alchemy of composting, and fertile soil generation.

AW. Lastly, you’ve recently moved to Australia, if I’m not mistaken, and are currently in residence at a glassblowing workshop. What has this experience taught you? How has it expanded your practice? Anything else to add? 

TH. Glass is another process and material that has to do with conditions, like soil. When you give sand and silica conditions, heat, glass is possible. A seed, soil, light, water, it grows. I think those two were in sync for me in Green in the Grooves, and I continue to ride that wave, as it’s so mesmerizing, and what grows from the processes continues to keep me in awe. I’m working on the Gardener’s Bar at this moment, a greenhouse, all the windows made through the fusing process. The structure has character sections for Gardener, Country Worm/city worm, Sunspider, Gardener. There’s a codex that accompanies the greenhouse and translates the sculpture onto pages. This process is always teaching me to listen, to flow, and to know myself.