About
Gallery North presents an exhibition of new works by Holly Hendry, winner of the 2013 Woon Prize, marking and celebrating the culmination of her award and twelve month residency at Baltic 39 studios.
In a giddy floppiness of excess materiality, open cracks give way to metal bars and a type of exterior skeleton that resembles prosthetic limbs or crutches. Hollow Bodies explores the physical and physiological relations that the body has to architectural spaces, public and private, as it inhabits, returns to and moves through them.
As structural forms, architectures have their way with us, informing and conditioning the way we live. Hendry's works emerge from this, replicating and transforming dimensions taken from domestic architectural interiors into new autonomous 'inflatable' forms. Hendry is drawn to personal living spaces as 'memory' architectures with knowable boundaries, conceiving of these as imprinted hard frameworks that give way to stickier, more complex relations. The autonomous sculptural forms investigate this complexity, inviting wandering and provoking movement in their viewing. Heightening these tensions of encounter, Hendry uses industrial materials such as metal, wood, cement and plaster, basic building aggregates and processes of casting and construction to draw on the inside and outside of things. Bringing us to objects that are formed from the inside out and shaped from the outside-in. Invisible volumes and inflated spaces.
Hendry's physical forms bare the marks of their making. The plaster membrane is nude and suspended like skin over knuckles, buckling under its own weight and evoking the hollowness of its form. The works are in pieces; behaving like tiles or bricks, stacked or cut off at the limbs, suggestive of the classical, fragmented figures that they mimic and mock.
About:
Holly Hendry is the Woon Tai Jee Art Fellow at Northumbria University having won the Woon Foundation Prize for Painting and Sculpture in 2013. She is about to undertake her Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art, London (2014-16), having completed her BA at the Slade School of Art, London (2009-13). She presented the March Project at the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2014) and has also showed work at Lewisham Art House, London (2014) and The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014).
The Woon Foundation Prize is awarded by Mr Wee Teng Woon a graduate of Northumbria University and is open to students in their final year of undergraduate study. The prize is valued at ௿½20,000 and supports the Woon Tai Jee Art Fellowship at the BxNU Institute for Contemporary Art at BALTIC 39. The Institute is the result of a collaborative partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University.
Gallery North was founded in 2009 and is located within Northumbria University. It has shown work by leading UK artists including Sean Scully, Dexter Dalwood, Bob & Roberta Smith, Anne Bean, Lisa Milroy and William Cobbing. From 2015 it will be supported by the curatorial and exhibitions research group NEUSCHLOSS.
