Raymond Henshaw is an artist and curator. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University, a BA in Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Diploma in Graphics and Advertising from Salford Metropolitan University. He explores a variety of subject across a number of media, including printmaking, painting and photography. He has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland, and in Europe, Africa and the USA.

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“Without art, I think my horizons and understanding of the world and its cultures would have been narrower”.

Raymond Henshaw took the traditional route through Third Level to study Art. At college, he had two tutors who were highly influential, Harry Stirrup and Ken Wilson who gave him his initial chances and instilled in him a sense of self-belief. He went on study at University and to go through to a period of finding his place within society and of growth and development.
“What I still like about the piece is the intensity of the blue, it’s deep and rich.”

The artwork in The Louth County Collection, Calm, is a fake seascape and is an amalgamation of several shots the artist took of Shelling Hill, Templetown Beach and other areas in the Cooley Peninsula.

He took elements from the photographs and combined them through Photoshop to create the exact seascape he had envisaged. For this work, notions of reality interested him: What is true/false and what can be constructed reality? He feels that at the time of making the work, the ‘fake’ reality of television shows etc. had seeped into elements of his work and manifest themselves in this simulated seascape. It was also a precursor to other works, leading to several more seascapes that had very different narratives which included more historical references and incorporated poetry and text alongside the image.

Raymond’s current practice centres on the everyday object as a poetical metaphor and taking utilitarian objects, combining their functional associations with imagery, text, and location, to impart a new visual narrative.

These narratives function around notions of transportation of cultural values and its symbolism. In travel when people migrate, they take their cultural belongings and add them to the place they newly inhabit. This can be more readily seen through cuisine, music, stylistic changes in dress, theatre and art.

He is also expanding a body of work that has wider narratives that offer reflections on the transient nature of life and mortality. Questions such as How do we individually and collectively leave marks/traces of our existence on the world? are posed by his work. To attempt to answer these questions, he is documenting and archiving the existence of people he comes in contact with. He takes photographs on location or at his home when friends call. A personal archive which is filtering into installations and digital pieces.

Although the artist is not one of those portrayed, he is the catalyst for this group, his own archipelago of relationships brought together through work or socially, and visualised in his artwork.

Find out more about this artist here: www.raymondhenshaw.com