Introduction

Don't brings together two bodies of work by Camille Henrot: the Dos and Don'ts painting series (2021- ongoing) and a selection of drawings spanning 2014 to early 2026. Drawing is foundational to Henrot's expansive practice which moves fluidly across painting, sculpture, installation and film. A daily exercise in seeing and thinking, Henrot has said, "If I don't draw, I don't really feel myself." The act of drawing links these two bodies of work, and the exhibition juxtaposes the Dos and Don'ts and the drawings to explore consistent themes in Henrot's practice such as the relationship between digital and analogue form, the creative process and social behaviours, desire and the formation of the self.

Henrot's work is characterised by a restless intelligence and a deep fascination with how we organise knowledge and construct meaning. Inspired by everything from psychoanalysis to social media, anthropology, literature, art history and cartoons, and preoccupied with the twin spheres of privateand public life, Henrot mines both her own personal archive and the internet's vast network of digital information for content and form.

The Dos and Don'ts paintings draw on vintage etiquette manuals as source material alongsidepersonal documents such as medical bills, family photographs, to-do lists and scanned brushstrokes from Henrot's 'Brushstroke Library'. The material is combined through a layering of digital and analogue printing, collage and expressive painting techniques, revealing tensions between order and excess, authority and vulnerability. Henrot explores the relationship between contemporary painting and digital culture, confronting the instability of authorship, authenticity, and human exceptionalism in an era increasingly shaped by AI.

In contrast, Henrot's drawings operate as autonomous, intuitive works that map psychic and libidinal states. Often erotic or surreal they depict hybrid human-animal figures, unstable identities, and shifting power dynamics. While the Dos and Dont's address external systems - a world of spreadsheets and x-rays, algorithms and manners - the drawings expose an unruly inner life of desire, rage, humour, transformation and becoming. Installed in dialogue at The Perimeter the works form a structural relationship establishing a dialectic between instruction and action, thinking and feeling, the unconscious and the conscious in a deliberately unresolved and tender tension.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Polly Staple, published by The Perimeter, designed by Thomas Spallek and edited by Henrot and Staple.