Henry Hemming

Born in 1979, Henry Hemming went to school in and around London, followed by university in Newcastle. Two months after graduating with a 1st in History he began a year-long journey through the Middle East in a second-hand Toyota pick-up truck called Yasmine with another artist, Al Braithwaite.

At school Henry and Al had talked – albeit in the slightly dreamy unrealistic sense of the word – about the idea of travelling the world as artist-explorers (with patchy beards (see right). Both believed in the value of making work in situ and allowing their setting to interfere as much as possible with their artistic process. The journey through the Middle East that followed was, more or less, the first time they’d put this idea to the test.

In August 2003, a year after they set out, they returned to London having nearly being killed in Baghdad (Al more than Henry),with a large body of work in the back of their truck as well as three successful exhibitions completed. These took place in Tehran, Muscat and Amman. They sent a proposal for a slightly off-kilter visual account of this journey to Booth-Clibborn Editions and a year later Off Screen was published. A series of international exhibitions coincided with its release.

Meanwhile, Henry worked on a written account of the journey which was eventually taken on by Nicholas Brealey Books; in early 2007 Misadventure in the Middle East was born. In the months that followed, while continuing to make and exhibit art, yet wanting to understand something more of the country he had grown up in, Henry set out in search of what he imagined to be England’s last remaining eccentrics. He wanted to update the term ‘eccentric’ for the 21st century. This quest took him from a cave-like former-sheep pen on the Isle of Skye inhabited by the Leopard Man, through to discussing Gulliver’s Travels with Pete Doherty, or flattening a crop-circle in the dead of night with England’s leading crop-circler. The resulting book, In Search of the English Eccentric was published by John Murray in June 2008. He’s now working on a new book for John Murray, in between preparing for his next exhibition.http://www.henryhemming.com