Plinth

If buildings can proudly wear their own guts, so too can artists. Hendry’s work often begins ‘from a kind of unmaking – figuring out how something is put together, where it’s come from, or where the labour is held in the normal, everyday objects that we interact with.’ Certainly, it comes as no surprise to learn there are architects and doctors in the family – kindred spirits in their methodical dissection of form and function. Viewers, too, are invited to share in the act of taking things apart – an experience akin to the obsessive curiosity of a clockmaker and, at other times, the wheels-off-the-wagon lurch of life falling apart. ‘I don’t know if it’s ever just one way or the other,’ Hendry says. ‘I want the insides-of-things to spill or burst – to create an interruption to the homeostatic rhythm of something.’ She gives the example of your tummy rumbling, when you suddenly become aware of digestion. Something dumb, immediate, embarrassing, she says, can become a ‘tool to talk about something a lot more complex’.

As such, Hendry is always on the lookout for ‘those moments of breakdown or slapstick chaos.’ Slacker (2019) is a case in point. The vast machine, which is currently on view at Mead Gallery as part of Material Worlds, resembles a deranged printing press or a giant pasta maker. Images of body parts loop round its rollers as if a cartoon character has been caught and flattened by the mechanism.

When showing at the De La Warr Pavilion in 2021, Hendry certainly found herself in a chaotic moment – emerging from the pandemic as the reality of Brexit hit hard. With the ‘opportunity of this space on the South Coast, where all those socio-political and environmental issues seem really at the forefront – you can see France, you can see the yellow smog on the horizon and the sea – the act of taking things apart became really essential.’ While researching Bexhill’s maritime history, she discovered shipworms – creatures that burrow into wood – and the figure of ‘the worm became a catalyst for me to visualise the weaving together of information and stories’. This research culminated in Invertebrate, a worm-like sculpture made from local materials including suitably earth-coloured bricks reclaimed from a nearby brickworks. The sculpture appears to chew its way through the De La Warr Pavilion’s roof, as if testing its architect Erich Mendelsohn’s analogy of a building as an ‘organism’, down through its ceilings and out through a wall onto the lawn. Complex cycles of destruction and regeneration, natural and man-made, are compressed into a deceptively playful image.

Correspondingly, the works inside the Pavilion speak to the artist’s interest in ‘diagrams, X-rays, anatomy manuals, and DIY books – documents that break down these things that I look at, such as bodies and buildings and places, into something really simple.’ Limescale (2021) resembles a cross-section of a toilet, while works like Slow Siren (2020) and Lingua (2021) evoke ant farms where you can peer in at the stratified soil – or, imagined on a larger scale, they evoke the layer-cake site models of a quarry with their cuboid edges.

‘I'm always interested in that idea of a cross-section, that language of an edge or a surface that gives you a different way of visualising the original object,’ Hendry says. Translating between flatness and three-dimensions has practical implications for her work, too, during the planning phase. ‘For all larger sculptures that I do, I always make a debossed version of the preparatory drawings,’ she explains. By indenting the image on paper, the artist brings what could seem remote and theoretical ‘back to touch and the hand again.’ Using this technique, the limited-edition print Weft (2024) echoes the flowing rhythm of its counterpart, Slackwater, but stands alone as a calligraphic, meditative work – a silly-straw reminder that there are a multitude of ways of getting from A to B. Its colours are inspired by ancient maps featuring sea monsters, the artist explains, where she finds the uses of colour ‘both ancient and really modern’. Here, the colour of the ducting mimics rain-patinated copper roofing or ancient, hand-painted waves, while the red, pink and orange capsules representing the boat fenders as seen from above blip and dance into abstraction. Weft is at once ‘the monstrous map and the architectural plan.’

In fact, monstrosity is key to many of Hendry’s works. Slackwater was partly inspired by a 19th-century satirical Punch cartoon, 'Monster Soup', which depicts a woman recoiling in horror at the microscopic bugs she can see magnified in a drop of Thames water. Another related influence was Joseph Bazalgette, the civil engineer who designed London’s sewer system. Indeed, Slackwater reads as if Hendry has unearthed a section of the London sewer system and given it new life with the bright colours of adventure playground tunnels, bringing a sense of play to an otherwise hidden infrastructure. Once again, the artist’s deceptively simple, often undulating sculptures tell deeper, slipperier stories about the places they inhabit.

‘I think the political and radical aspect of public work in cities is about how it interacts with people – its ability to do that, and its ability to weave its surroundings into that work itself,’ Hendry says. Placing a sculpture in a public space is a political act in and of itself, ‘especially one that has so many associations with land ownership or hierarchy’, she says, referencing the ships once moored at Temple pier and the ill-fated Garden Bridge project championed by Boris Johnson. Writing itself into this history, The Artist’s Garden affirms ‘artistic interventions by women artists’ in a field where public sculpture commissions overwhelmingly go to men. This is not to mention that only 17% of statues represent women, as found in a recent study by Art UK.

Rather than a traditional bronze figure on a plinth, Hendry is more interested in representing the complexities and messiness of bodies and feelings through abstract forms. Her sculptures cultivate rhythm and motion. They spill over. Order and mess are held in tension just as both are a necessary part of daily life. This, like that. Her sculptures are attuned so much to their place in the world, alive to the relationships between things – as if, once highlighted, we can shift them. The architectural plan proves to be not so different from the monstrous map. There are plans, and there is the ever-present ridiculousness of making plans when the only guarantee is this moment now. Perhaps you are reading this at home. Perhaps you’re standing on a once neglected roof terrace next to a jumble of tubes and electricity spools when your tummy rumbles – no, it’s just a tube pulling in underneath The Artist’s Garden. A motorbike rumbling past. The moment of stillness in the Thames before the tidal stream changes direction.

By Sammi Gale

Find out more about Holly Hendry

Cover image: Holly Hendry, Slackwater (2023) in The Artist's Garden (2023). Courtesy of the artist and theCOLAB. Photo: Hells Gibson