Henry Hudson
16:00-18:00
Edition 1 of 1 For his NFT genesis piece, Henry Hudson has created an imagined tropical jungle caught alite. The title suggests a time of day but this work is impossible to locate in history, it stands outside, a portal into another world or a window into dreams. This NFT is based on an artwork originally made of sculpted plasticine. From his studio in East London, Hudson assembles these large imagined tropical environments drawn from a wide range of sources, including photographs taken during visits to Kew Gardens, internet images and historical books of botanical illustration. Using the new medium of NFT, Hudson has extended the narrative found within his plasticine 'Jungle Series', giving the viewer further space for their imaginations to explore, to question, a place to find and deposit fantasies. The scene is infused by a sense of foreboding by the flickering light of the flames. Are we witness to the beginnings of a forest fire? Will the flames be extinguished soon by a tropical storm? Hudson's Jungle does not prescribe to the Romantic idea of nature as paradise. Rather, he presents the wild as at best indifferent and more likely actively malign and cruel. Hudson has often cited the influence of Werner Herzog. Herzog has said of the jungle "I see it full of obscenity; the nature here is vile. . .I see nothing erotic here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival.” Hudson here continues his playful use of storytelling within his practice, using the jungle as an allegory of the human condition.
