A series of paintings dedicated to the rituals of girlhood by Philadelphia-based artist Mary Henderson. Henderson received her BA in fine arts from Amherst College and MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. Having come of age at a time when girls’ interests were largely denigrated, Henderson observes the recent reframing around the cultural salience of girlhood. For Henderson the shift feels both momentous and fragile. Nevertheless, her paintings fully embrace the particularities of an era made up of sleepovers, ballet-carpool rides, friendship bracelets, and choreographed dance routines.
In this way, the series is also about motherhood and the sense of “time travel” Henderson herself experiences in the presence of her adolescent collaborators (her daughter and daughter’s friends). “I observe them in the rear-view mirror or from the bleachers,” Henderson describes “my personal sensory memories of braces, split ends and peeling nail polish are always present.” Sourcing her imagery from an archive of personal iPhone snapshots, Henderson is interested in the capacity of representational painting to draw attention to what may have originally been casual or peripheral visual information:
“Because my compositions tend to center on the ephemeral, the intimate and the fragmentary, I typically work from low-resolution corners of larger reference photos. The resulting painting process is highly interpolative, and involves supplementing my source material with extensive visual research as well as direct observation. The highly-saturated and largely invented palette shifts the images away from a feeling of immediate perception and towards a more interior space informed by mood and memory.”
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