Ethics of The Dust Book Project — Jessica R. Henderson

Jessica R. Henderson

Artist / Designer / Educator

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.

Ethics of The Dust Book Project
Spring 2024

Concept 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.”