ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a mixed media artist and writer living just outside the town of Joshua Tree where I was born. Having grown up near the San Andreas Fault in the desolate, desert town of Landers, I became attracted to the risk, disappointment, and surprise of mixed media. I like the mess. The shards. The cracks in the molding. The faces hidden in the walls and bushes. The times, too, when the piece doesn’t move for days and I stare and stare, waiting to learn what it wants to become. The majority of the images you'll find in my collages come from vintage issues of Life Magazine, some dating as far back as 1930. I often incorporate vintage and antique paper, dried wildflowers from the Mojave Desert, metallic flake, and text from old books on etiquette, entertaining, and housekeeping. Many of my pieces use erasure, blackout, and other techniques to create small poems or mantras that lift female-identifying persons up out of the mire of stereotypical domestic captivity and reaffirm their individuality and potency. Others are still-life collages of a time that seems at once vintage and present-day. I am also a maker of unique, mythical, feminine, mixed-media paper dolls that are imbued with strength, resilience, and love of self. Like my collages, they are ephemeral but fierce.
ARTIST BIO
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert towns of Joshua Tree and Landers. A visual artist and writer who often utilizes both text and image at the same, she is the author of six books including Starshine Road, which won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize, and the poetry and art book From the moon, as I fell with artist Zara Kand. In addition to analog collage and erasure, Henley also creates strange, mythical, mixed-media jointed paper dolls that incorporate elements of collage. Sometimes the dolls even dance wildly in her stop motion videos. Her collage and other mixed media work has appeared in Waxwing, Thrush,The Indianapolis Review, Candyfloss, Arthole, Adroit, and elsewhere.