This is Madness: A Proof

Carolyn Henne

About the Exhibition:

Rage becomes us. No diagnosis is needed. This is not hysteria; it is the most

Carolyn Henne’s work contends with personal and public states of being. It does not easily ride on the currents of the cool and intellectual. It wallows in the prosaic but debilitating sentiments of the inner self that are unclaimed by the self that must maintain its profile in the world.

Her installations include interactive elements, low tech animations and, very often, seating serving to slow and extend viewer interaction and allow for a time-released experience.  In this way, the viewer(s) complete the piece.  
Her process involves the visceral and the sensual. She revels in the supple shapes and volumes that echo pressure from within. Years ago she made a set of tools that she has used in her work in some fashion since. She made a casting of her body and gridded it off 3-dimensionally yielding 3-D “tiles” that could be cast over and over again and reassembled in a variety of ways.  The tiles chosen are specific and limited in number.  The works that result are akin to “blasons anatomiques – poetic tributes to the individual parts of the female body… there were blazons in praise, laudatio, or counterblazons in blame, vituperatio, expressing the spectrum from adoration to revulsion…comic and tragic, divine and mundane” (Adam’s Navel, ANatural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims)

About the Artist:

Carolyn Henne’s sculpture is largely informed by anatomical studies – from simple school-house diagrams to NIH’s Visual Human Project. Her work ranges from large, complex interactive installations and performances to more straightforward, discrete objects. Suspended Self Portrait is in the permanent collection at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and was featured in the NIH’s exhibition and catalog, Dream Anatomy.

Carolyn Henne is on the faculty of FSU’s Department of Art and serves as the Head of Sculpture. She also serves as the co-Director of Comma, a project housed at the Facility for Arts Research (FAR).