Overview
Stephen Friedman Gallery presents a new installation by British artist Holly Hendry for Frieze New York, accompanied by a studio film and an essay by Lotte Johnson, Curator at Barbican, London.
“The sculptures are objects that appear to exist halfway between a paper note and an X-ray. They convey something that feels quite instinctive or immediate, like a written reminder to yourself or a passing feeling or memory – a literal pin up in sculptural form. Most of the works incorporate new elements of cast metal or glass, so there is a tension between permanence and impermanence: a scrappy note of ‘things to do’ fossilised in metal, or an internal gut movement held in convulsion through the liquid shape of blown glass.”
Stephen Friedman Gallery presents a new installation by British artist Holly Hendry for Frieze New York, accompanied by a studio film and an essay by Lotte Johnson, Curator at Barbican, London.
Holly Hendry: In the Studio
Objects are always bodily and often animated in Hendry’s work. They consume, gulp, sputter, leak, digest, convulse, heave, writhe, squirm and rest. For her show Fatty Acids at Stephen Friedman Gallery (2022), she staged an out-of-kilter production line of sculptures that unpacked and reimagined corporeal processes – yawning, sneezing, crying, digesting – as machine-like operations, all submerged in an environment that was painted custard-yellow. Some works were mechanised, whirring into action; Hendry had been researching Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s sculptural costumes that conceived of the body as mechanical.
In Hendry’s hands, materials shapeshift and elude containment. She loves casting and mould-making – working with Jesmonite for its malleability, with clay for its ability to be freely moulded, plaster for its liquid potential to mimic, lead for its endless possibilities to be reformed.
Lotte Johnson
Lotte Johnson
Endless material experimentation defines Hendry’s practice. Two recent commissions, Sottobosco (part of the exhibition When Forms Come Alive, Hayward Gallery, London, 2024) and Slackwater (at The Artist’s Garden, on the roof terrace of Temple underground station, London, 2023), use industrial ducting to create snaking forms that writhe across and sometimes through the buildings they occupy.
Lotte Johnson
Hendry is also interested in the idea of the X-ray, making the body permeable and laying bare what’s beneath a surface, where bodily functions are given microscopic attention. In Ossicle, she explores the tiny bones inside the ear, known as ossicles, that transfer the vibrations of the eardrum into waves in the membranes and fluid of the inner ear. Continuing her experimentation with glass, glowing transparent orange tubes suggest the ear’s cavities, twisting around and through sheets of Jesmonite paper, with steel arrows indicating a flow of acoustic energy in and out of their channels. Hendry describes wanting the works to “feel slightly like anatomical close-ups through the language of stationery.”
Lotte Johnson
Hendry’s works are always site-responsive, from the eroding coast of the UK and the liquid geography in Georgia, to the monumental structure of The Shed that now houses Frieze New York. For her solo presentation at Frieze, she has summoned an office environment into one of the fair’s compartment-like booths. It is as if her studio pin-board has expanded into the space, each tacked-up piece of paper transformed into a series of objects, like a psycho-sculptural to-do list. As with all her work, what might appear mundane on the surface is excavated, turned inside out, peeled back, to reveal a complex system of inner workings.
Another silhouetted ear is cut into a sheet of aluminium peeking out from a letterbox that greets visitors before crossing the threshold of Hendry’s sculptural office environment. It dangles down from the gaping hole as if listening in on the conversations in the office beyond, alluding to the voyeuristic possibilities of the letterbox. The opening spews other stuff – a ceramic postcard, a steel envelope, a Jesmonite sheet of paper. Everyday ephemera are given weight and permanence, refusing disposability. Titled Junk Male, Hendry plays with sexual innuendo and ideas of gendered expectation. A phallic roll of newspaper is cast in bronze – a material with hefty and often masculine associations in the history of sculpture. The letterbox suddenly seems absurd, spitting out the contents that it usually consumes while offering a peek into the private life beyond.
Lotte Johnson
Hendry’s works are always site-responsive, from the eroding coast of the UK and the liquid geography in Georgia, to the monumental structure of The Shed that now houses Frieze New York. For her solo presentation at Frieze, she has summoned an office environment into one of the fair’s compartment-like booths. It is as if her studio pin-board has expanded into the space, each tacked-up piece of paper transformed into a series of objects, like a psycho-sculptural to-do list. As with all her work, what might appear mundane on the surface is excavated, turned inside out, peeled back, to reveal a complex system of inner workings. Two gobstopper-like eyes made of sodalite stone nestle in the curl of a thick sheet of ‘paper’ cast from Jesmonite, sagging under their weight.
Lotte Johnson
In Mind Blank, a set of sickly-yellow pupils made from calcite stone pop out from peeled, eye-like openings on another sheet of ‘paper’ (this time made of ceramic), pinned onto the wall. An uncoiling steel spring hangs just to the left, while underneath a curved sheet of aluminium protrudes, its swirling coagulated surface suggesting the blurred psychological state of the work’s title. Someone has been at their desk for far too long.
Lotte Johnson
In Hendry’s work, bodies are intermingled with their elemental environments. Bodily systems, built systems, weather systems and administrative systems are intertwined in a state of playful breakdown and reconfiguration.
Lotte Johnson
Institutional Highlights and Public Commissions
Artist Biography
Hendry was born in 1990 in London, where she continues to live and work. She gained her BA Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art (2013) and her MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (2016) in London.
The artist’s first solo show in the USA opened at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia in February 2024. This coincided with the installation of a new outdoor commission at Hayward Gallery, London. Other recent public sculptures include ‘Slackwater’, commissioned by theCoLAB for Artist’s Garden, Temple, London (2023); ‘Lip-sync’, STEAMhouse, Birmingham, commissioned by Eastside Projects with Birmingham City University (2023) and ‘Sump’, Esch2022 European Capital of Culture, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg (2022).
Hendry has had institutional solo exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (2021); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2019); and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2017). Group exhibitions include those at FRAC, Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans, France (2022); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2022); Somerset House, London (2021); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2021). In 2019, Hendry participated in the Biennale de Lyon, France and Liverpool Biennial.
Her work can be found in significant public collections including the Arts Council, British Council and Government Art Collections, UK and FRAC Grand Large, Dunkirk, France.
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