Sean Henry, ‘Seated Man’, Sculpture Forest. Photo Grant Hardwick
Location: Pilot Hill Arboretum, Bago State Forest
Statement: I am interested in ideas around identity, how we perceive each other – and ourselves – in relation to others. I prefer to keep the identity of the sitters anonymous, and to engage with what I call ‘the psychology of scale’ by making my figures either significantly smaller or larger than life size.
Biography: British sculptor Sean Henry graduated in ceramics from Bristol in 1987 and had his first solo exhibition in London in 1988. He was the first sculptor to win the Villiers David in 1998 and has had more than 35 solo shows during his career. His artwork is regularly exhibited by galleries in London, New York, Stockholm, Frankfurt and Brussels.
Art historian Tom Flynn says “Henry’s people are both reassuringly familiar and compellingly strange, materially present but somehow distant. Their subjects are anonymous and yet we recognise a shared humanity through the specificity of the clothes they wear, the pensive expressions on their faces, the way they stand, sit, or clasp their hands. These physical characteristics tell of lives and back stories we can only guess at”.
Henry’s large-scale sculptures are represented in public collections in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and the USA. Recent installations include ‘Seated Figure’ at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and ‘Walking Figure’ in the Artic Circle at Svolvaer, Lofoten, Norway.
Sean Henry exhibits in Western Australia for the first time at Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe 2024 as the Tourism WA Invited International Artist.
Stage one of the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail was jointly funded by the Australian and NSW Government’s Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund, under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.
