In January 2024 Studio 88 Artist Residency welcomes British designer and artist Richard Henley. Find out more about his work here!
Richard is a multidisciplinary designer and artist, with a background in set design for film and theatre, and product design for interior furniture and lighting. He has worked on blockbuster feature films, award-winning stop-motion animations, and designed for industry-leading interior design studios. Despite the commercial nature of these industries, the backbone of all his work comes down to two things: craft and storytelling, and it’s these which also form the basis of his work as an artist. He considers himself a natural ‘maker’ and he loves working in a wide variety of materials, and exploring new media and different ways of working.
His self-directed artistic work is an exploration of physical spaces, built structures and objects that hold narrative potential. He creates images that express a queer-coded escapism: strange and quiet places that are composed of familiar ingredients, but take on a surreal quality through their unfamiliar arrangements. In recent years he has worked predominantly on digital paintings, creating cinematic freeze frames that present a moment in time, sometimes with people and other times without. It’s not so much about the human narrative but the emotion and drama of the place and its objects, everything in the image contributing to telling a story.
Building on this practice, at Studio 88 he will work on developing 3D lighting sculptures. He plans to design and prototype a small collection of lighting pieces that are both tangible in the real world, and depicted in a 2D “dream world.” For Richard, this work is about storytelling: making the sculptures possess, or be part of, the narrative; part of a world and its emotions.
Richard is also keen on using the time to reconnect with more traditional media, such as painting and drawing, drawing inspiration from quiet and unlikely places, and in the community around him.
Header image: Taipei Cinema, Personal Artwork. Digital Concept. Software: Rhino 3D & Photoshop
Studio 88 Artist Residency 