Jessica R. HendersonArtist / Designer / Educator
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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
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