Six questions for
Henrik Potter

How do you describe your own art practice?

Humanist, with a central importance given to the object made. We are given a form of time travel in making artworks, with small, strange pieces of ourselves in existence beyond our own lives. It’s a magic, which through all kinds of societies and times, has somehow survived. So that must mean something for our shared humanity.

In the everyday, depending on the person I might just say: ‘something between painting and sculpture’. I would describe it as ‘earnest’ in certain company. Often I wouldn’t want to describe it at all, through embarrassment, shyness, disgust or just bloody-mindedness.

Which question or theme is central in your work?

How to bring something truthful out of myself? The greatest joy is in surprising yourself, in finding out how strange you are to yourself. If there is a theme, it might be just one shared with everyone; living on this idiotic, senseless planet and emotionally responding to it, and thinking about it and finding yourself similarly senseless and idiotic, or joyful or deep in sorrow, or however and letting yourself in all these states be channelled into making work. And then dealing with what has been made, these answers to questions which are strange to us, and then to hopefully have it resonate within others.

What was your first experience with art?

Probably many that I’ve forgotten. The one I remember would have been when I was six or seven maybe. My parents took us, randomly, as something to do on a holiday, to a museum where they had a show of Flemish masters. I remember a lot of paintings of skeletons and people being flayed and other horrors and it terrified me. There was something in it more real than film or photography or the news. There was an immediacy across hundreds of years that I couldn’t shake off.

My parents also had a good friend who was an artist. Abstracts in ink and oil, very early nineties style. He gave them quite a lot of works to keep on loan and visited regularly, so making art didn’t feel as strange and otherworldly as it probably would have otherwise.

What is your greatest source of inspiration?

In short: emotion. Form and image and thought are secondary and come after, when required, but the starting point is always a feeling that wants to come out.

What do you need in order to create your work?

Time and security and space. I would like more time and more space. The security is all right at the moment, luckily.

Oh and wasting time. Just a deep ocean of heavy time. As if I have three hundred years to make. Where I could spend ten, thirty, eighty, years waiting and feeling if I needed to. Boris Groys wrote something about art works existing in deep time, and I like to put parts of myself there if I can.

What work or artist has most recently surprised you?

Two days ago, Saturday 3^rd February 2024, it was the signatures at the bottom of Don Van Vliet paintings.

11^th November 2023 it was seeing a Michael E Smith show and how he managed to find another seemingly perfect combination of materials and forms after so many years, and wondering how deep his well is.

13^th June 2023 it was seeing Judith Dean’s work for the first time and not being able to leave them and so for the first time in my life seriously considering buying a work of art.

12^th June 2023 it was seeing an Agnes Scherer laptop work for the first time in real life and laughing at the scale and confidence and beautiful idiocy of it.

3^rd of May 2023 I surprised myself with six small works I made in the immediate aftermath of a deep loss.