Overview
'Slackwater' is Holly Hendry’s first public commission in London and her most expansive to date. Curated by Claire Mander for The Artist’s Garden, this site-specific work occupies the vast terrace on the roof of Temple Underground station. The project continues theCoLAB’s dedication to commissioning innovative contemporary installations by women artists within this unique, half-acre site. The Artist’s Garden has been realised in close partnership with Westminster City Council since 2021.
'Slackwater' emerges as an immense sculptural entanglement that weaves together the watery history of its riverside location, with references to the abstract rhythms of the Thames and liquid movements within the human body. In conceiving the work, Hendry was drawn to changes in the pattern of the river’s surface; after slackwater, when an incoming tide meets the fluvial flow, water stills, and then eddies – whirlpooling against the main direction of the flow – before pursuing its course upstream. Constructed with industrial-scale ducting, curled around electricity spools and over casts of inflated boat fenders, the work ebbs and flows across the site’s architecture. The artist’s visual language brings together both scientific research and cartoon imagery. Its pastel tones and exaggerated forms are drawn from ancient depictions of floods and rivers, and 19th century microscopic images of Thames water, described as ‘monster soup’, a bacterial slurry teeming with surreal, animated forms.
Holly Hendry says: 'I have been using the pattern of tide, wave and sound motion diagrams to create a physical rhythm and a surface in the space where things interconnect, tighten, loosen and come undone. I hope to confront and challenge the idea of what sculpture in cities can be – the constant change in how we move and exist in relation to this, something that opposes individual static permanence and hierarchy.'
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