Henry Tyson
Henry Tyson is a multimedia artist based in Chicago, Illinois. They graduated from Macalester College in 2023 and are pursuing their MFA in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have focused their practice on exploring the unstable and, occasionally, contradictory interests and identities that they hold.
Tyson’s current work “vandalizes” unstable histories into something they find beautiful while honoring and challenging the exclusionary communities of hyper-sexual gay men. They place the meticulousness and presence of mind learned through study and writing of poetry in conversation with the physical labor and muscle memory of production pottery.
Artist’s statement
Hand shaping a body is intimate and technical; knowing that my thumbprint with the right pressure and angle creates a convincing xiphoid process is exhilarating and euphoric. The malleability of wet clay, words composed on a page, and charcoal have directed me through investigations of queer embodiment. I ideate through the sonic & compositional qualities of the written word in an effort to convert sound to emotion. Emotion converts to form.
I find sculpting clay profoundly tactile and grounding; my practice affords me agency over the forms I create. As a genderqueer person who often feels disconnected from bodily experiences, agency is refreshing. I sculpt words too. Poem structure requires depth; both visual and metaphorical. I focus on figurative studies –never working from live models and rarely from reference– to learn about my own body. Human bodies lack templates; they fold and bend and twist and differ and break.
I exercise the muscle memory developed over years of production pottery to work (with clay and 2D media) quickly, decisively, and freely. I explore the contrapposto, cinquains, and post structuralist poetry through a queer lens to challenge past and present conceptions of gender. I contemporize the architectural elements of relief sculpture & the styles of past erotic queer media to display comfort, confusion, lust, and interpersonal strife.
Is it not a basic function of the body to hold another?
Book him, babe
Dax takes portrait commissions, shoot bookings, questions, and compliments, preferably in that order.
Some slots fill fast. Interpret that how you will.