Vulnerability Hangover: A Conversation with Thomas Houseago

There are moments in art when the creative act feels inseparable from survival, a source of sustenance as much as vision. An acute tension between fracture and form, between vulnerability and vigor, runs through the work of Thomas Houseago. For more than three decades, the British-born, Los Angeles-based sculptor has built a language of figures that appear at once monumental and provisional: bodies assembled from clay, plaster, rebar, bronze, and pigment that carry the visible signs of their making. Fought-for presences, these masks, torsos, hybrids, and standing figures seem to emerge from psychic as well as material pressure.

“Journey,” Houseago’s current exhibition, arrives after a prolonged period of personal rehabilitation. His return to sculpture was neither immediate nor assured. If the title suggests movement, it is not simply movement through space but through experience, through uncertainty, collapse, recovery, and the difficult work of beginning again. The new sculptures retain Houseago’s longstanding concern with scale, weight, fracture, and bodily force, but they also carry a new measure, an altered tempo, as though they were shaped not only by compulsion, but also by deliberate contemplation. 

For Houseago, sculpture is inseparable from lived experience. Violence, tenderness, myth, domesticity, memory, gender, and healing all enter the work not as external themes, but as presences metabolized through making. Relief, he says, is often followed by a “vulnerability hangover.” The phrase is telling. Sculpture is not a retreat from exposure, but one of its deepest forms, a way of giving weight, contour, and endurance to what is otherwise unbearable. 

Rajesh Punj: Giant Striding Figure (Van Gogh on the Road to Arles) (2025), which opens “Journey,” stands not only at the threshold of the exhibition, but also at the start of your return to sculpture. Did everything begin there?
Thomas Houseago: Yes, that work begins at the beginning. After my breakdown, I didn’t want to be a sculptor anymore. I didn’t want to make art at all. I stopped for years. The piece is deeply connected to the man who treated me during that period. He was a mental-health professional, but his approach was very radical. It wasn’t just about medication or control. He believed profoundly in dignity—that you have the right to remain yourself even when you’re ill. He used to say there were beautiful things inside me that I was throwing away with the pain. His aim was not simply to stabilize me, but to reconnect me with what I was capable of. Gradually, he guided me back toward sculpture. It was frightening at first, almost surreal, to begin again after so long. Then, unexpectedly, he died. But by then he had given me enough to continue. He always said that his job was to make sure that one day I would know I could live without him. So, Giant Striding Figure carries a lot. When it arrived in Brussels from Malibu, where it had been sitting outside among trees, birds, and snakes, it suddenly looked entirely different. In the gallery, the shadows changed it, the room changed it. I started seeing things in it that I hadn’t seen before. In a way, it is the most mysterious sculpture in the show.

RP: The figure in your work is never merely anatomical. It is also psychic, mythic, and emotional. When I think about Giant Striding Figure, or the other works here, I think about figures that hold themselves together through force rather than finish.
TH: I’ve never been interested in the figure as a resolved image. I’m interested in the figure as a site of pressure. Sculpture, for me, has to hold contradiction—weight and fragility, monumentality and exposure, aggression and tenderness. I don’t want the body to feel complete. I want it to feel lived through. That’s why the seams remain visible, why the joins matter, why the surfaces are often rough or interrupted. I need the work to show the struggle of its own making. If it becomes too polished, it loses something essential.

RP: There is a strong sense of energy, of violence even, that surfaces from the work, in the way it has been built. Do darkness and light serve as the skin and bones of the work?
TH: Violence is an important part of the conversation. I grew up with violence, and my body was damaged by violence when I was very young. That kind of experience changes everything—not only the body, but also the soul, your very sense of origin. As I grew up in Leeds, that violence continued in different forms. Eventually, it becomes internalized. Without support structures, you absorb it and carry it inside you. 

When I entered the art world, I couldn’t relate to a purely cerebral idea of art—the artist standing outside the world and analyzing it calmly. My experience was different. Violence had already entered my system. When I discovered artists whose work held that intensity—Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, artists who placed the body and risk at the center of the work—it resonated very deeply. Sculpture, for me, had to contain that energy. But I don’t think the violence in the work is there for effect. It is more like witness. When I look at Goya’s “Black Paintings,” I’m not disturbed—I’m reassured. Someone saw the horrors of their time and said, “This exists.” Art can do that. It can acknowledge reality without turning away from it.

RP: Technically, your work appears almost schizophrenic in its desire for control as well as collapse. The sculptures often look as though they were made in emotional bursts—rapidly, physically, impulsively—yet they also convey long duration. How do you decide what to do?
TH: The process is very strange. I work constantly—seven days a week. Since my recovery, I’ve become even more focused. But the rhythm of making is not linear. I might work very intensely on a sculpture for three weeks straight and then not touch it for months. That doesn’t mean the work has stopped. It just means it continues differently. Sometimes I draw on the sculpture during that period. Then, I return physically and work hard again. There may be another quiet stretch when I only make a few cuts with a chainsaw, very lightly, just thinking about the structure. Those small interventions can be more important than the dramatic ones. It’s like a dance. That’s why I work on many things at once. Eggs, figures, drawings, paintings—everything exists together in the studio. Visitors often find that disorienting, but for me it’s natural. My studio is less a Modernist workshop than a living environment. In some ways, it’s closer to a treatment space. Painting nature began as part of my therapy, but it became something I genuinely love. It grounds me.

RP: The studio is not simply a place of production.
TH: No, not at all. It is a place of survival, experimentation, recovery, domesticity, and memory. For years, I didn’t really have a studio in the traditional sense. I worked at home with my kids around. It became almost pre-industrial—cardboard, glue guns, wax, small constructions, drawings turning into objects. My children would say, “It’s weird…but it’s great.” That play matters. I’d see something on television, remember a cartoon, come across a prop, and it would mutate into form. The Minotaur head, for example, began with a monitor in my studio in Los Angeles that I used to put things on. It was almost like a Fellini prop. From there, it evolved into something sculptural, mythic, wearable, absurd.

RP: The Minotaur recurs in your work as a strange hybrid: part mask, part body, part fiction, part inheritance. What draws you to it?
TH: It gives me access to an artistic family. I don’t believe in the Modernist fantasy that each artist begins from nothing. I love how ideas travel—from the Greeks to Picasso, to Fellini, and on again. When I visited the Picasso Museum in Málaga, I was shown some extraordinary drawings related to Fellini’s dreams of Picasso. Fellini even joked that Picasso was his producer. The idea that art moves through dreams, through memory, through inheritance fascinates me. The Minotaur lets me step into that lineage. It’s myth, but it’s also very practical. When you make the thing, it’s heavy, awkward, difficult. You put it on your head and realize very quickly that myth is one thing and sculpture is another. That tension is important to me. We also work in a very Luddite way. We use waste molds. You break the mold to reveal the cast, almost like an archaeologist uncovering bones. If something goes wrong, that’s it—the piece is gone. I like that natural order. It keeps the work honest.

RP: There is another honesty in these new works that feels different from the rawness of some earlier presentations. Though they hold on to violence as a visual energy, they also feel for your vulnerabilities—especially the flowers, animals, and more domestically scaled works. Was that deliberate?
TH: Very deliberate. For this show, I wanted to be gentle. Not soft, but gentle. “First Light,” at the Rubell Museum in Miami, is almost too raw, even for me. Here, we wanted the work to feel like a gift. We wanted tenderness to exist alongside violence—not to cancel it, but to stand with it. That has a lot to do with what I learned in treatment. In very dark periods, they taught me radical acceptance. You say, “Yes, that is happening. I understand that. But at the same time, in my home, I am going to have a plant I love.” For me, it was sage, native flowers in Malibu, very simple things. If you are dissociating or losing control, you focus on the flower. You say to yourself, “That flower exists right now. I am looking at it. Do I think it’s beautiful?” At first, something in you will say, “This is stupid, beauty is meaningless.” But gradually, you learn to stay with the thing itself. The practice of this radical nowness changed how I see. The flower becomes a shape, the jar becomes a silhouette, and suddenly you are building experience again through looking. At first, I painted flowers and moons. Then I started thinking that perhaps I could pull those images out of the painting and into sculpture. That’s where some of these works come from.

RP: Is beauty, for you, less about appearance and more a way of remaining present?
TH: Exactly. Truth is beauty, beauty truth—I’m a Keats guy. But truth is often ugly. The question is whether you can stand with it, rather than being swallowed by it. We live in a world full of horror, but I don’t think the answer is denial. The answer is attention. If you can sit with the truth of the world and still make flowers, or still make something tender, then that tenderness has earned its place.

RP: There is a suggestion that your relationship to the body has deepened. Some of the figures feel deliberately open, fluid, unresolved in terms of gender.
TH: Yes, that is very intentional. During recovery, I began to understand that identity, including gender, is more fluid than we often assume. In the studio, I don’t experience myself as strictly male or female. I feel more like an energy moving through the work. That affects how I use forms. The penis, for example, appears in some works not as a symbol of power, but almost as a sign of menace or trauma. In other works, sexuality appears through flowers, eggs, organic shapes. Trauma itself isn’t gendered. When people speak honestly about these experiences, the boundaries between male and female can dissolve. What remains is simply the human condition. I learned a meditation practice in treatment that has become important to me. You begin by observing your thoughts and asking, “Who is observing these thoughts?” Then, you observe your body, and again ask, “Where am I, if I can observe both my thoughts and my body?” Gradually you reach a strange realization: the observer may be something beyond those identities. When I first experienced that, I felt almost without gender—simply an awareness, an energy. That changed how I think about sculpture. You can see it in the body here. The belly, especially, is crucial. The stomach is where we feel instinctively—gut feeling, first brain. That’s why the belly and navel appear so often in my work. They are zones where intuition, vulnerability, and physical experience meet.

RP: You speak about sculpture as presence. At the same time, you also describe the artist’s position as precarious, solitary, even structurally marginal. Is that contradiction part of what gives your work its energy?
TH: Probably, yes. Sculpture is a strange act because it goes against the logic of the world. Every object around us has a function—chair, table, cup. Sculpture has no practical use. In a society organized by utility and economic value, simply placing a useless object into the world can feel like a violent act. People imagine artists waking up every morning excited to make another sculpture. Often, it’s the opposite. You wake up thinking: “Why am I doing this?” It’s exhausting. It’s dangerous. It takes too much time. When I was raising my children as a single parent, I often wondered whether I should continue at all. The world is always asking why it’s so big, how it will ship, who is it for. The pressure is always toward less. And yet you continue. Even after success, you realize that artists remain fundamentally outside the system. You are still alone, still negotiating, still defending the work. In that sense, we may not be as far from Van Gogh’s time as we imagine. The artist is still in an avant-garde condition: precarious, exposed, often misunderstood.

RP: That precarity seems linked, in your case, to a broader idea of culture itself—not just making sculpture but defending a space for reflection against distraction.
TH: What worries me now is the dominance of entertainment culture. Politics, social media, public life—so much of it is constant stimulation, constant drama. Real culture does the opposite. It slows you down. It asks you to stop, to look, to feel what is actually happening. Museums and artists matter because they create those spaces of attention. A big part of my practice now is connected to healing—my own and, hopefully, that of others. People reach out to me privately about trauma, depression, all sorts of things. The work I did in recovery changed my life. I try to pass some of that on when I can.

RP: “Vulnerability hangover” is your phrase for the emotional residue that follows exposure. Does that feeling follow you?
TH: Always. It’s that feeling when you’ve opened yourself completely—in the work, in life—and afterwards you’re left with the echo of it. Relief comes, but it’s followed by a strange aftershock. The work holds that. The surfaces hold it. The seams hold it. The vulnerability doesn’t disappear once the sculpture stands up. And maybe that is what “Journey” really is. Not a journey away from vulnerability, but deeper into it. A way of accepting that creation often begins where certainty ends.

“Journey” is on view at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels through April 30, 2026. Thomas Houseago’s survey exhibition at the Rubell Museum, Miami, “First Light,” continues through September 27, 2026.