The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Holly Hendry

This year, Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024) was included in another Hayward Gallery group show, “When Forms Come Alive.” The work was visible in cross-section through the first-floor window, a wormy tangle of large metal ducts in a variety of green tones. When viewed from the roof, sections of tube could be seen hanging and draped around the window ledge, spilling onto the roof. The expansive work played with the iconic Brutalist architectural space.

“The Hayward is this important concrete modernist monolith,” Hendry told Artsy, during a visit to her South London studio. “The challenge was to bring liveliness to this beautiful heavy framework. I wanted it to have a kind of succulence.” She chose to work with ready-made pipe sections, a regular feature in her installations. “The pipes have come up a few times in my work, starting with Sharjah Art Foundation in 2014. [They] are something I can shape and move around, becoming quite fluid on that scale.”

Hendry began to conceive of Sottobosco after visiting the basement of the Hayward and seeing its own piping system. “Everything always starts with thinking about the space and spending time in it. There is usually something that relates to current or ongoing research. That may trigger more research, so it becomes this period of hectic collecting, drawing, writing, spider diagrams. The work happens when the research overflows or combusts and something has to come out of it; a bit like being sick!” she laughed. After this, she starts putting ideas into 3D design software SketchUp, exploring how the final work will feel in the exhibition space.

During the studio visit, the giant, skin-like insides of Slacker were draped across a row of wooden trestles, covering almost half the floor space. This part of the work consists of a long sheet of rubbery pink synthetic material, decorated with surreal images of teeth, worms, and bones. In its full state at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2019, this element was fed through a kinetic system of rollers, like a printing press. Both humorous and gruesome, it looked like a giant, hammy slice of a human body being pulled and squeezed by an industrial machine.

“There is this almost slapstick approach to materials themselves,” she said. “Trying to stretch them like a cartoon or bend them in ways they shouldn’t go.” Her pieces consider the inherent violence of medical drawings, which are presented as learning tools in a way that strips the body of its emotional resonance. The recurrence of gut-like forms in her work reflects a more complex meeting point between feeling and function. Our guts are practical waste dispensers, yet they are also referred to as our second brain, full of sensitivity.

“I use this as a good analogy for my work,” she said. “When your tummy rumbles, you are suddenly conscious of your stomach. It draws you back to something squelchy.” While her pieces lack a direct sense of gore, they are a constant reminder of our mortal forms. They are also tactile. “I think it’s fundamental, that desire to touch and understand, to feel inside the thing you can see with your eyes,” she continued.

Recently in her work, Hendry has begun to explore humans’ connection with water. For Slackwater (2023), the artist installed a claustrophobic system of labyrinthine metal tubes at London’s Temple tube station, which commuters could walk around. In this work, Hendry was interested in the history of Temple’s riverside location, creating a parallel between the movements of the Thames with the liquids in the human body. The metal tubes’ shapes and forms, which were tighter and looser in different areas, reflected patterns and mini whirlpools in the river’s surface when its natural flow meets with the incoming tide.

In this work, she was inspired by creative mapmakers of the 20th century: oceanographer Marie Tharp, and U.S. Army cartographer Harold Fisk, who depicted the Mississippi river, considering its movement through time as well as space. These images show creative, human attempts to make sense of the land around us.

“I thought a lot about water for [her 2021 solo show] ‘Indifferent Deep’ at the De La Warr Pavilion; this idea of dryness or parchedness,” Hendry said. “Water, fluid, hydration, even oil or petrol, is used to make things run.” The show included her installation Invertebrate (2021), a rambling sculpture made from thick pink and red tubes burrowing through the roof, spilling from the balconies and onto the lawn. Inside the gallery, Hendry showed a selection of smaller-scale sculptures of body parts within an installation of a disintegrating landscape, reflecting on De La Warr’s close proximity to the water’s edge and the erosion of the coastline.

Elsewhere, she explained, the 2024 exhibition “Watermarks” at SCAD Museum of Art referenced water levels and flooding. The exhibition featured four large glass vitrines on the front of the building, with Hendry’s installations squeezed inside, some pressing tightly against the brick arches. Each piece imagined what the inner workings of the building may look like, featuring playful loops of industrial piping and mechanical gears alongside sculptural renderings of giant water droplets and eyeballs that seemed to float. For this work, Hendry explored the Greek myth of the naiad Cyane, who dissolves in her own tears, and Savannah’s location as a port town. “It was talking about things leaking,” she said, “When water comes into my work, it’s often dripping, crying, or falling.”