Borrowed Worlds

the Fall '25 Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant Exhibition

Ingrid Henderson '19  |  Korina Hernandez '20 |  X.S. Hou '21

Jewett Art Gallery

Oct. 20 - Dec. 12, 2025

Borrowed Worlds is an exhibition of new work by Ingrid Henderson '19, Korina Hernandez '20, and X.S. Hou '21. Henderson, Hernandez, and Hou are three of the recipients of the 2023-24 Alice C. Cole ’42 Studio Project Grant. The other two recipients of the 2023-24 grant, Olivia Gorman '22 and Ry Watkins '23, will be exhibiting work together in Spring '26.

Materials are critically important for all these artists: hand-dyed and sewn fabrics for Henderson; ceramics and 3D printing for Hernandez; metals, silk, bioplastics, and slime mold for Hou. All three artists think carefully about the histories carried within and implied by their materials. Henderson's painstakingly constructed fabric collages and garments ask a viewer to consider historically domestic and feminized labor in relation to the urban landscape. Hernandez combines the ancient art of ceramics with contemporary fabrication technologies that speak to changes in the form and meaning of heritage objects when removed from their originating communities and brought into the museum space. Hou's use of salvaged industrial material, cybernetic components, natural fabrics and live organisms create myths and rituals that bridge tradition to our techno-architected present.

Each of these artists imagines an alternative to conventional understandings of place. Henderson's pieces turn the improvisational and quick sign or mark into a slowly and deliberately constructed element of the urban fabric, while offering opportunities to literally embody the metropolitan. Hernandez envisions a new context for objects that have long been inaccessible to the communities that created them, and offers the possibility of a new way forward for institutions currently holding such objects. Hou's constructs. 

merge human effort with the unpredictable traces of nonhuman action, proposing sculpture as a new site for care, co-agency, and alternative knowledge production. Each artist, in their own way, creates and offers a way to inhabit a kind of borrowed world.

The Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant provides project-based support to recent Wellesley College graduates for the development, production, and exhibition of new work in painting and sculpture, whatever those disciplines may mean to the artist. The fund enables promising recent graduates to set aside time for artistic development as well as to purchase materials, rent studio space, or access facilities for the creation of new projects.

Ingrid Henderson makes fabric collages that translate scenes from public space into textile form. The images include a ladder leading nowhere, a cone flipped upside-down to plug a hole in the sidewalk, and a train station crowded with competing signs, among other things. Locals may pass these signs without a second thought, but to Henderson they resemble an iSpy page, dense with overlooked images and shapes. She photographs these moments because they reveal how people leave traces for others to interpret. She is drawn to signs, quick fixes, and improvised gestures that communicate across time, from one presence to another.

She is especially interested in cones, which she has seen used throughout the city in countless ways. Hung from a wire to signal a downed line, flipped to cover a hole, or left in the street to redirect traffic, they communicate while also briefly solving a problem. Each placement carries the trace of the person who put it there, a reminder that these mundane objects can hold intention and creativity.

By recreating these images in fabric, Henderson gives permanence to fleeting encounters and asks the viewer to look closely at the scenes to which she is drawn. Hours of dyeing, cutting, and stitching highlight the labor of textile work and the hand that creates it. This labor is too often dismissed as "women's work," categorized as craft rather than art. Her work insists that textiles are not confined to softness or domesticity, but can hold weight, permanence, and criticality. Shown as wall pieces, garments, and flags, these works challenge assumptions about value and function, and question the boundaries between art, labor, and everyday life.

Korina Hernandez's curatorial and artistic practice centers expanding access to heritage objects and the cultural histories they hold. Her work includes artist-led digitization projects developed in partnership with institutions across the United States, with a focus on Mesoamerican collections and the politics of institutional access. Hernandez is additionally invested in social practice within queer and Latin communities, exploring forms of connection beyond traditional formats. 

The relationships generated between tactile objects and their digital reproductions are inherently based in physicality. The transposition of an object from one medium to another--clay to an intangible 3D scan, intangible scan to tangible PLA plastic print--takes the objects outside the bounds of their original medium while retaining some of their key characteristics. Although something of the original is lost, new possibilities are gained, including critically democratized access to important cultural objects.

The accession of these objects into museum collections is already an alienating process, as the object is removed from the sites of its making and its cultural context. Once part of a museum, access to the object by its originating people may be limited or in some cases entirely prevented. XR technology and 3D scanning/printing techniques allow the tools of today to offer a mediated but protentially still fruitful new life for these objects with the cultures that created them.

X.S. Hou constructs systems that join ritual, cybernetics, and material politics. They work with Physarum polycephalum (slime mold), silk, bioplastics, and salvaged industrial metal to stage encounters between living organisms and rigid architectures. Recent works generate maze structures through I-Ching diviniation; within these enclosures, slime molds grow as they are fed daily with oats. Their chemotactic paths across silk are indexical traces of care, constraint, and metabolic decision-making--notations co-authored with a nonhuman agent that make visible both agency and limit.

Each material they use carries distinct histories. Silk anchors the works to ritual memory, traditions of offering and divination. Bioplastics register humidity and decomposition, shifting with their environments. Salvaged metals--ventilation ducting, fan blades, vape debris--embody the afterlives of extraction, circulation, and waste. Reworked into reliquaries and mythical bodies, these remnants become counter-monumental forms that reorient industrial debris toward sanctity rather than control. Together, these materials propose a reality where decomposition and corrosion are not failures but sculptural forces.

Hou approaches this practice as the building of a restorative myth system. If secularization and industrialization scatter meaning, their works assemble fragments into provisional cosmogonies where humans, nonhumans, and residues negotiate shared worlds. By affirming impermanence and opacity as generative values, the practice resists canonical narrativess of progress and permanence, instead proposing sculpture as a site of care, co-agency, and alternative knowledge production.

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