Holly Hendry, Slacker, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo © Mark Reeves FAD Magazine
Artist Holly Hendry explores themes of decay, the body, and the use and re-use of materials in a new exhibition, The Dump is Full of Images, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) from 21 September 2019.
Through the exhibition, Hendry investigates ideas of excess, the build-up of material in the world, how we choose what to keep and what we classify as rubbish. The exhibition invites audiences to consider the value placed on the objects with which we fill our lives.
Central to the exhibition is Slacker (2019), a new work that fills YSP’s Weston Gallery and is Hendry’s first kinetic sculpture. A synthetic skin-like band (read about how this was produced in our sister publication Art of Conversation issue 3 ) is pulled around a steel structure that is reminiscent of a newspaper printing press or conveyor system. The band is embedded with fragments of discarded objects from the artist’s studio. Here the attractive colours and cartoon-like images are at odds with a darker interest. Hendry is concerned with what is hidden beneath surfaces from the ground we walk on to our own skin.
The accompanying wall-mounted sculptures are made using layered sections of plastics, plaster, imitation leather skins, wool fibres and mechanical elements. Intended to appear as though taken from chunks of the building or landscape, they extend the exploration of the relationship between the natural, or representations of the natural, and the man-made.
In researching for The Dump Is Full of Images, Hendry explored the connections between her work and the development of new materials in science and medicine, such as synthetic skins, with Parik Goswami, Professor in Technical Textiles at Huddersfield University.
YSP supports artists at every stage of their career to develop their practice. Hendry’s exhibition increases the number of female sculptors on display at the Park, underlining YSP’s commitment to achieving diversity and gender equality. In 2018, Hendry became the first artist commissioned to create work for Selfridges’ Art Block, a permanent destination for sculpture within the London store, co-curated by YSP.
Holly Hendry, Slacker, 2019 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo © Mark Reeves
Holly Hendry: The Dump is Full of Images Now –19th April 2020 The Weston Gallery ysp.org.uk/holly-hendry
About The Artist
Born in 1990, Holly Hendry lives and works in London. Hendry graduated from The Royal College of Art in 2016 with an MA in Sculpture. Her solo exhibitions/commissions include GUM SOULS, Frutta, Rome, Wrot, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Extract VI, GL Strand, Copenhagen; Cenotaph, Liverpool Biennial 2018 and More and More, More is More, Bosse & Baum, London. Her work has been included in many national and international projects and last year she was the Rome Fellow in Contemporary Art at the
British School at Rome. She is the recipient of awards including Arts Foundation Award for Experimental Architecture, Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Award and the Woon Tai Jee Art Fellowship. hollyhendry.com
