Somewhere in a melancholy, down-to-earth state between dream and reality.

Dr Henrica Langh is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher inspired by the magic of the ordinary and our delicate existence in this world. Her practice is highly process-led and serendipitous, and she works across different subject areas and mediums, such as textiles, photography, poetry, and installation. Rather than being solidified in finished outcomes, her practice forms an ongoing dialogue between theories, feelings, and material experiments that grow and interweave like a garden. She holds an MA in Applied Imagination from Central Saint Martins and a PhD in practice-led research from the University for the Creative Arts.

@henrica.langh

Recent exhibitions

September 2024 Sick of It (group show), Fourth Wall Folkestone

July 2024 The Untamed Self-Portrait: Rewilding the Female Image, Fourth Wall Folkestone

June 2024 Strange Cloth, Brewery Tap, Folkestone

May-June 2024 Deconstructed, Reconstructed, 35-36 Gallery, Folkestone

January 2024 Overflow (collaboration with Alex Boican), 35-36 Gallery, Folkestone [installation]

September 2023 (Magical) Presence, UCA Rochester House gallery, Canterbury

August 2023 Tiny Fires, 35-37 Gallery, Folkestone [installation]

July-September 2023 TEXTUS (group show) Torriano Meeting House, London

May 2023 I'll Just Bury You in My Heart, 35-37 Gallery, Folkestone [installation]

March 2023 (Magical) Presence, Brewery Tap, Folkestone

August/September 2022 Spectral, Brewery Tap, Folkestone [installation]

July 2022 Worlds within Worlds: In Transition (group show) James Hockey Gallery, UCA Farnham

October 2021 Practice as Research: PhD work in progress (group show) Foyer Gallery, UCA Farnham

Published Work

Conference Papers

Funding

Poetic Entanglement, 2023, TEXTILE: Journal of Cloth and Culture

The Morbid Anatomy of Emotions: Dress and Fashion as a Form of Art, 2013, BA dissertation

Distressed Garments: Clothes as silent witnesses of troubled worlds

Objects in Distress seminar, 2024 - London (online), Design History Society

Extraordinary Worlds: Excavating Poetic Narratives from Garments

Textures of Emotion: Textiles and Storytelling Interdisciplinary Conference, 2022 - Athens, Greece, Progressive Connexions

Sensing Presence: Garments as Sites for Recollection

The 5th Memory, Forgetting and Creating International Interdisciplinary Conference, 2022 - online, InMindSupport Poland

Exploring evocative garments through poetic contemplation: Poetry as a methodology in practice-led research

The International Conference on Poetry Studies: Poetry Between Creation and Interpretation, 2021 - online, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

The Bleeding Dress: When clothing becomes saturated with emotions

The 3rd Memory, Affects and Emotions International Interdisciplinary Conference 2021 - online, InMindSupport Poland

Funds for Women Graduates Main Grant 2022/23

Selected works

The Untamed Self-Portrait

The Untamed Self-Portrait, 2024 [multimedia collage installation]

It is so very hard…for women to make themselves present, because there’s so much to absent ourselves from. [T]he societal gaze…the patriarchal gaze…is so violent; it is on you all the time so, why would you just be totally present? You want to sort of zone out of it.’ (Levy & Hessel, 2021)

Historically, the social presence of a woman is different from that of a man. ‘A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies’ while a woman’s presence ‘defines what can and cannot be done to her’ (Berger, 1972: 39-40); an inequality that can easily be observed when comparing (visual) representations of men and (visual) representations of women. Men are predominantly depicted as embodiments of strength, power, and autonomy whereas women are shown as passive, available, and submissive. In traditional fine art, women have frequently been made present as a kind of offering to its audience (men), like an object to be desired and consumed. Western art is littered with images of women as submissive objects; as objects that men ‘were naturally “entitled” to desire, possess, and control’ (Nochlin, 1989: 9). As women we are conditioned to internalise this gaze, to accept it as ‘natural’. As John Berger argues, ‘[m]en look at women’ and ‘women watch themselves being looked at’. In other words, women are always to some degree spectators; spectators of themselves as seen through the long dominating tradition of the patriarchal gaze.

This practice-led research project challenges stereotypical visual representations of women as objects of eternal beauty, desire, and vulnerability through a process of visual rewilding. By deconstructing and distorting the female image through self-portraiture and collage, this research project seeks to explore and unpack how women’s external and internal image is influenced by the patriarchal gaze. The aim is to question and challenge the context in which representations of women have been shaped and controlled by the male gaze. In the female self-portrait, whose gaze is in control and who is being looked at? How can women make themselves fully present as subjects in a world historically not created for them? And how can we create new narratives that foster more holistic and truthful representations of women outside the dominating patriarchal boundaries?

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing (chapters 2 and 3). London: Penguin.

Levy, D. and Hessel, K. (2021) ‘Deborah Levy on Francesca Woodman, Lee Miller, Paula Rego, Leonora Carringtone’ The Great Women Artists [Podcast] Available at: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Wm9c3ztyZZDUG20w5TFzD

Nochlin, L. (1991) Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd

Tiny Fires

Tiny Fires, 2023 [installation with poetry embroidered onto textiles]

‘In that [cloth]...worked through and through...lies all the passion…Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood...as the needle?’ (Schreiner, 1982 quoted in Parker, 2010: 499)

Poems ‘say “give in” to the intensity and let your feelings dance across the page’, observes poet Nikita Gill. Poetry does not judge us for being too intense, too passionate, but lets our feelings exist in their truest form (Gill, 2023: XI). Sometimes, however, a pen or pencil may not be enough to fully express and contain the intensity of certain feelings.

Writing happens on paper; it is an imprint or a mark. Embroidery on the other hand, happens through cloth, it is stitched into the cloth. Due to the highly embodied act of continuous stitching-through, the practice of embroidery has a dynamic tactility that corresponds perfectly with the emotional intensity of poetry. As the needle pushes through, the feelings pushing at the insides become imbued within the cloth. The act of embroidery then, can function as a process of transference that gives the feelings a concreteness that written or spoken words cannot achieve. While the hand and arm physically connect body and thread, the act of embroidery also metaphysically connects the heart and the thread as the feelings pierce the cloth.

Stitching is a joining and rather than lingering on the surface, embroidery penetrates its medium so that the result is in fact not a surface with an imprint, but a marriage between two materials; the thread and the cloth become entwined with each other. In this installation, the poetry - or what is left of the poetic moment - is solidified into something intensely present through the merging of thread and cloth. The poetic fragments that have been embroidered on the curtains, the rug, the sheet, and the dress, emerged on different occasions but when read together they form a complete poem.

References

Gill, N. (2023) ‘Foreword’ In: Komachi, O. & Shikibu, I. trans. Hirshfield, J. The Ink Dark Moon. Penguin Random House.

Parker, R. (2010) ‘The Creation of Femininity’ In: Adamson, G. (ed.) The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg pp.491-500

Spectral

Spectral, 2022 [installation with draped cloth, video projection, and sound]

Spectral is an immersive installation by transdisciplinary artist and PhD student Henrica Langh. The installation is part of her practice-led research on the phenomenology of intensely evocative garments and seeks to capture her experience of a personally meaningful garment. The installation incorporates textiles, projection, poetry, and sound to expand the materiality of the dress and create a shrine-like space with the intention to invite the viewer into a state of wonder and reverie, much like garments that evoke intense emotions might do.

Through their close relationship to the body and their involvement with our day-to-day experience of the world, clothes can become intimately entangled with our personal narratives. While the clothes we wear literally absorb fragments of our physicality they also have the ability to metaphysically hold residues of our emotions. Worn garments are tangible witnesses that silently connect us to past feelings and other people. Certain garments even seem to acquire an uncanny, almost animated presence as if imbued with some kind of spirit.

The black dress that is enveloped by the installation was hanging dormant in the artist’s wardrobe for nearly a decade, due to its particularly strong emotional resonance. There is nothing aesthetically extraordinary about the dress, yet, through its connection with a specific moment in the past and a certain person, it has acquired an abstract emotional texture that transcends its physical materiality. Saturated with feelings from the past, the dress has remained as an emotional relic.

Providing a kind of reliquary for the dress that highlights its relic-like quality, this installation explores the emotional texture of the dress. Rather than describing the feelings or memories associated with the dress, the installation is an attempt at capturing the unique experience of the dress. The poem that weaves through the installation was not written about the dress but rather uncovered from it using a method of creative deconstruction developed by Langh as part of her research process. These poetic fragments provide a glimpse into the complex and abstract emotional materiality of the dress.