Holly Hendry: Lip-sync

'Lip-sync' is a major new permanent public artwork for Birmingham by Holly Hendry commissioned by Birmingham City University and curated by Eastside Projects. Part of the STEAMhouse project the large-scale sculpture draws on both the history of the building as the headquarters of The Eccles Rubber and Cycle Company, and its new function as a centre for collaborative innovation.

Made from rolled, formed and lasercut steel, with smaller hand-cast elements, Lip Sync’s surface features cartoonish, body-like shapes co-developed with students from Birmingham City University and pupils from Chandos Primary School in Highgate in a series of ‘exquisite corpse’ workshops where individual drawings lead from one to another to create a collective collage.

Details, marks and forms from the workshops were fed into computer software where they were simplified, and amalgamated into a colourful and apparently continuous ribbon, a fluid band which weaves through a series of industrial rollers, appearing from and disappearing into the ground – perhaps even flowing underneath the building, or the city. On closer inspection it becomes clear that Lip Synch’s surface is made up of a puzzle of individual elements that are rolled and fixed together, different parts engineered, coloured, stretched, and flattened by multiple industrial processes.

Lip-sync’s structure echoes the Jacquard Loom, a textile weaving machine in which thousands of punch cards were used to produce fabrics with patterns of almost unlimited size and complexity. The loom, and the Jacquard cards which it reads, is considered the earliest example of computer software. Its punch card system led to the binary system of ones and zeroes that underpins modern computing.

Holly Hendry said: "I am incredibly excited to install my first permanent public art commission, and it is an honour to have it be part of the new STEAMhouse site. One way to think about the sculpture is as a response to the past and future of the site itself; the rubbery, cyclical processes contained in the history of the former Eccles Rubber and Cycle Factory and the present (and future) of STEAMhouse as a place of innovation and exploration. In this sense, I hope that the sculpture is a playful figurative monument that speaks of animation and bodily entanglement with our technological surroundings."

Hendry’s site-responsive sculptures and installations are concerned with what lives beneath the surface, from hidden underground spaces to the interior workings of the body. Casting is central to the artist’s process in which she uses an array of materials, including steel, jesmonite, silicone, ash, charcoal, lipstick, soap, foam, marble, aluminium and grit.