Brett Henrikson is an Artist-Photographer… artist being the most important part. Photographic processes are his hammer and chisel, as he approaches the world and uses visual language to understand and reinterpret being. His bodies of work vary from work about intersection of life and death, classical portraiture and nudes using the wet plate collodion process, and using the physicality of the photographic object in a new and unconventional way. He is based strongly in the craft and alchemy of the process and believes that the hands on aspects of working in the darkroom and using film or large format gives the artist a real sense of creation over their work. Henrikson has a studio in Central Falls, Rhode Island in an old mill above a loading dock, where he can blast vinyl symphonies while making prints in the red warm confines of his womb like darkroom. Henrikson is currently President of the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative with the goal of providing more art opportunities to aspiring and established artists in Pawtucket and the whole of Rhode Island.
All Images are Silver Gelatin Contact Prints from Cut and Arranged Wet Plate Collodion Negatives.
I go deep into the imagination. Skin becomes metallic, and the slow nature of working in the darkroom takes on a meditative quality. I aim for the images to take on the same meditative state that the process offers me in the darkroom, a quiet intimacy, a dark beauty. Collodion is pure; it’s like having a bonfire and taking the ashes of burned branches and drawing on the sides of a cave. Some might draw running horses or portraits of man. I let the light from the fire guide my sense of mysticism into somewhere new that only exists in the ether, on the shimmering light from my darkroom trays and from behind my eyes. Now when more work is done behind the computer, working with my hands in the dark, I am without rules or limitations, and the medium is free.
To view more of Brett’s work, please visit his website.