Last June, at Art Basel’s Exchange Circle in Hall 1, Topical Cream brought its editorial conversations to a panel in Basel, Switzerland. Executive Director Lyndsy Welgos and 2026 Editor-in-Residence Victoria Camblin sat down with artist Lena Henke for “Mind Mapping: From Knowledge to Form.” The panel considered a question that runs through Camblin’s 2026 programming: How do artists turn lived research and experience into art?

Research is often treated as the quiet work that comes before the real work: the reading, looking, collecting, note-taking, and lived experience. “Mind Mapping” brought these assumptions into question. This conversation treated research and information gathering as an artistic medium in its own right, research as a material just as valuable as any other. Welgos and Camblin spoke with Henke about the ways she considered knowledge mapping as part of the work, not a step before it.

Henke, Topical Cream’s 2024 honoree, has built a practice in which sculpture becomes a way of thinking through space, place, and systems. Her work draws on histories, imagined sites, and personal experience, which she often reworks into monumental forms with blurred origins. 

Three threads shaped the conversation. The first was memory: how personal and collective memories are stored, recalled, and reworked. The second was research: how the relationship between research and personal narrative is mapped out in a work and how artists make those decisions when creating an object for public consumption. The third was activing intutive experience: the knowledge that comes from the body and from daily life rather than from archives or institutions.

For an organization dedicated to elevating the vision of women and gender-nonconforming artists, these questions are more than academic. Who gets to count as an expert? Which forms of knowledge are recognized, and which are dismissed as merely personal and uninteresting? An artist’s private system of research, including the notebooks, collections, and associations that cannot be codified in wall text, is a form of material as well. 

The talk took place in the bustling open forum of Art Basel’s Exchange Circle, near the entrance to the fair’s Unlimited section, a pioneering exhibition platform whose 2026 edition was curated by Ruba Katrib, a Topical Cream board member and former Editor in Residence. After the talk, Welgos captured artworks in Unlimited, which featured a number of Topical Cream friends and alums.