This month’s Artist Profile focuses on Holly Hendry, who is one of the featured artists in the Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 and the focus of a new film by the Arts Council Collection.
Holly Hendry is interested in defining the architecture of spaces by exploring the possibilities of space, colour and density, which is inherent in the wide range of materials she uses in her site-responsive sculptures and installations. She is interested in what lives beneath the surface, from hidden underground spaces to the inner workings of the body.
Her process positions casting at it’s centre where she uses a wide range of materials including plaster, steel, silicone, cement, jesmonite, plywood, rock salt, soap, aluminum, marble and even lipstick and chewed gum. Her works bring up questions about consumption, the environment, and bodily implications. In the new film she explains, “I guess it becomes about the agency of objects and our relationship with them.”
Material unknowns are an important part of her process, as she states “A lot of making in my work relies on instinct or changing things at the last moment or material emergencies or slippages then become a really essential part of the work and that is something that is almost impossible to predetermine.”