Jessica R. HendersonArtist / Designer / Educator
Feed
Born in the 80’s, Henderson has lived two distinct lives. Her childhood and high school years were, for the most part, pre-internet. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 as she graduated college; heavily tethering the second half of her life to a smartphone and social media. Henderson has a lot of questions about the ways these tools and devices have formed/are forming her as she finds herself continuously navigating the tensions that they seem to create. The smartphone certainly provides many benefits, but it also entices one to consume, placate discomfort with distraction, and resist the limitations of time and space. These activities often feel in direct competition with the deeper and more complicated longings of her soul— to contribute to the world through thoughtful creation, attentiveness, and lean into the limitations of embodiment. With the ever-increasing pace of technological advancement, it is essential that  we critically evaluate how personhood is continually shaped and re-shaped by the adoption of each new tool and device.

Henderson works through these questions and tensions in her artmaking practice. Viewing her computer and phone as a digital archeological dig-site of sorts, these repositories are culled for photos, screenshots, texts and other source imagery that become autobiographical evidence and documentation of everyday life. Through abstracting, combining, documenting, distorting, re-processing, duplicating, and recombining these elements a visual language emerges that mirrors the endlessly regenerating behavior of technology itself. The work is primarily two-dimensional; utilizing digital and handmade processes like vinyl cutting, CNC routing, digital printing and screen printing in ways that are densely layered. Sparkly, metallic, reflective, slick surfaces are punctuated with dimensional interruptions, distortions and handmade marks that embody analog/digital tensions. 
Deeply Placed Exhibition Book
Spring 2024Design by Jessica Henderson in collaboration with Karen Brummund and Elisabeth Pellathy

 6x9”, 74 p. with clear duralar dust jacket and custom stickers.

This book is an extension of the Deeply Placed Exhibition that took place at Samford University in February 2024 and was made possible thanks to a grant from Alabama State Council on the Arts. It includes essays considering what it means to be deeply placed in an ever-shifting world through a variety of interdisciplinary lenses. 

Essays and visual content by Karen Brummund, Jennifer Allen Craft, Lauren Frances Evans, Jessica Henderson, Brett Levine, Jared Margulies, Elisabeth Pellathy, Claire Thompson, and Felicia Wu Song.


Ethics of The Dust Book Project
Spring 2024Concept by Lex Thompson. Design by Jessica Henderson and Lex Thompson. Serigraph covers by Jeff Wetzig.
Eleven saddle stitched booklets in slipcase, 10 x 6.75 x 1.25”, 174 p., 11 image plates, edition of 50.

View the complete project and learn more about History-Papers at lexthompson.com

Description and photo documentation courtesy of https://www.lexthompson.com/books/the-ethics-of-the-dust “Published by History-Papers, John Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust is a dialogue, teaching ethics and aesthetics under the guise of crystallography – joining science and the humanities. The ten lectures are housed in individual volumes, each with a silkscreened cover. An introductory volume contains a new introduction by Ella Mershon, Ruskin’s front matter from the second edition (1875), and photographs by Lex Thompson of minerals made in museum period rooms. The text is set in two alternating columns to emphasize the structure of the dialogue with a format resembling text message exchanges.”



Deeply Placed Exhibition
Winter 2024Samford University
Birmingham, Alabama
Additional Programming:

  • Friday, Jan. 26 at 9:15 a.m. - Seminar in the Art Gallery with guest theologian, Dr. Jennifer Allen Craft - Exploring the Tensions of Place Through Theology and the Arts
  • Thursday, Feb. 15 at 1 p.m. - Seminar in the Art Gallery with guest sociologist, Dr. Felicia Wu Song - Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age
What does it mean to be present when the life we live moves untethered between a physical and digital universe? New works by artists, Karen Brummund (Tuscaloosa, Ala.), Jessica Henderson (Minneapolis, Minn.), and Elisabeth Pellathy (Birmingham, Ala.), observe and draw these two parts of our life, tracing the footprints we leave. Using digital tools like video, laser cutters, and 3D scanners and printers, these artists extend the art of mark making and move past the surface in more ways than one.  

Text from https://www.samford.edu/arts/events/Deeply-Placed


New Work
Summer 2023 Digital prints, acrylic, cut vinyl
25 x 19


Between a Path and a Road
Time is Money
That We Hardly Notice


Look Am I Solo Exhibition
Fall 2023
  • Northwestern College
  • Orange City, Iowa















Laham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the age of information. University of Chicago Press, 2007














1 2 Song. Felicia Wu. Restless Decices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age. IVP Academic, an Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2021.
3 Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Waterbrook, 2019.






Bethel University Art + Design Department Faculty Exhibition
Fall 2023
  • Bethel University
  • St. Paul, Minnesota


  • Exhibition documentation by Michelle Wingard

All the Kids and All Their Phones
Summer 2023 CNC routed MDF, paint markers, pencil, acrylic sticks, neighborhood kids ages 3+










9 Laham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the age of information. University of Chicago Press, 2007
10 Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.