Holly Hendry.
Photo: Photo by Nick Ballon. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.
Artist to Watch: Holly Hendry Takes Playful Approach to Inner Workings of the Body
It's been a breakout year for the British artist with a sell-out booth at Frieze in New York, and presentations at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah and Hayward Gallery in London
British artist Holly Hendry likes to get under the skin of things, creating playfully dynamic sculptures that probe the inner workings of the body and seem to take on an unruly life of their own. She is best known for her monumental works responding to architectural spaces, such as the twisting mass of metal ducting that snaked through a window of London’s Hayward Gallery for the group show “When Forms Come Alive” earlier this year.
Ossicle by Holly Hendry. Photo: Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.
A similar energy pervades her new series for Stephen Friedman Gallery’s sold-out booth at Frieze New York in May, which reflects the artist’s shift toward smaller scale. There, a long pink tongue and a protruding nose appear among sheets of “paper” cast in clay or Jesmonite (an eco-friendly alternative to resin), all the elements thrown together on the wall as if on a pinboard. Preparing for the presentation was a “moment where I could just be in the studio,” Hendry says, which marks a change from recent years, when she produced large outdoor pieces that required “rigid planing” with structural engineers.
Hendry describes feeling a sense of intimacy with the artworks as the making process “unraveled” intuitively from experimentation with materials, including a new foray into glassblowing. “I think when my work is at its best, it’s got an element of the unknown,” she says. Although the artist first plots her ideas in a notebook, “a lot of the time, the final thing is quite far from the original drawing.” Judging when a piece is ready often comes down to whether the “feeling or movement” captured in the sketch has made the leap into three-dimensional “physicality.”
Hormones by Holly Hendry. Photo: Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.
In keeping with the malleable, flowing forms she crafts, Hendry hopes the meaning of the sculpture will shape-shift over time. “Once you do those types of works, you’re not really the key part of it anymore,” she says. “It becomes part of a larger conversation or existence within the city.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Fall Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Holly Hendry.
Photo: Photo by Nick Ballon. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.
