Exhibition Information:
February 26, 2024 - June 24, 2024

Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art
Savannah, GA

Organized

Thumbnail image: Holly Hendry, Her fingers, legs, and feet were liquid first, 2024. Courtesy of SCAD

Installation view of “Watermarks,” SCAD Museum of Art. Courtesy of SCAD.

Sculptor Holly Hendry approaches the SCAD Museum of Art’s historic edifice as a porous network of passages and conduits. Framed within the glass vitrines on the building’s facade, the artist’s new diorama-like installations offer imagined cross-sections of the museum’s inner workings and infrastructure. Each work evokes looped industrial pipes, deflated mechanical gears, and strange anatomical forms to encourage reflection on the relationships between sculpture, the human body, and the built and natural environment.

In particular, Hendry focuses on the theme of flowing water, referring both to the liquid movements found across Savannah’s aquatic landscape and to our human anatomy. Some of her caricature-like sculptures appear to be inundated by floods, while others undulate and tumble in wave-like formations or leak teardrop-shaped blown glass drips. The artworks’ titles also reiterate this intermingling of body and water, referencing lines from Ovid’s story of the water nymph Cyane, who dissolves in her own tears — an apt metaphor for the effects of the global climate crisis and rising sea levels. Hendry’s richly detailed creations give life to the hidden aspects of our surroundings — elements that might be concealed from our view yet nevertheless undergird our reality.


ABOUT THE ARTIST
Holly Hendry (b. 1990, London) received an M.A. in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, and a B.A. from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has presented solo exhibitions in the U.K. at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. Her work has also been included in group shows at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Somerset House, London. Hendry’s installation Deep Soil Thrombosis was included in the Biennale de Lyon 2019. The artist was chosen by Helen Pheby, head of curatorial programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Selfridges as the inaugural artist for the co-curated Art Block in the store’s London flagship in 2018. For the Liverpool Biennial the same year, Hendry created Cenotaph, a monumental sculpture that was included in the Biennial’s touring program and shown at The Tetley, Leeds. Hendry’s work is held in the U.K.’s Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, and British Council Collection, as well as in the collection of the FRAC Grand Large, Dunkerque, France.