Brian Clarke’s HENI the Eighth is a stained glass artwork installed at HENI Gallery, on Lexington Street in London. First exhibited at the Brian Clarke: A Great Light exhibition at Newport Street Gallery from 2023 to 2024, this window draws on one of Clarke’s longest-running interests: heraldry.     

The upper three lights are based on King Henry VIII’s coat of arms from the Great Watching Chamber of Hampton Court Palace. Below, he visually quotes heraldic devices from the stained glass of Hampton Court and Rochdale Town Hall, known to Clarke as a child. He combines these sources with what he has called ‘Pop-Art use of colour and iconography’. Alongside the HENI logo emblazoned in the lower corners, the window conveys what Clarke has described as the ‘reductive abstraction’ of historic heraldry, ‘so 20th century it sometimes staggers me…’.

For Clarke, growing up in Oldham, heraldry was omnipresent:

‘...every bus had the local coat-of-arms on it; every dustbin wagon had the coat-of-arms on it, and every public building... It was something that was present in the language of the day. And the more I saw it… the more I started to see it like a semaphoric cryptography; it’s a language in itself… a world of extraordinary symbolic power and metaphorical richness.’    

Displayed alongside his 2015 Lexington Street Spitfires windows at HENI Gallery, which transform the iconic fighter plane into a heraldry-inspired repeating pattern, these works encapsulate Clarke's distinctive approach to this theme.