Junk Rocker

Artist Holly Hendry’s new solo show conveys her taste for waste.

In 2013, a 140m-long digger named Phyllis completed her 4.2-mile tunnel dig for London’s Crossrail. At the finish line, job done, she had to dig her own grave. Deemed too heavy to be extricated, she was cast aside, gutted of valuable parts and bricked over. Phyllis’ plight struck a chord with British artist Holly Hendry – so much so that, last year, she installed a work in London’s Selfridges in memory of the digger. The multilayered sculpture was embedded with ‘things that don’t disappear’, such as chewed gum and fake nails – tokens of disposability and consumption staged within a temple to consumerism.

Since graduating from the RCA in 2016, Hendry has enjoyed a sharp ascent, with major solo shows in Berlin, Rome and, most notably, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, making an impact with large, site-specific installations on themes of decay, the body and material reuse.

Hendry is not afraid of going big and thinking deep. Homeostasis, created as part of a residency at Sharjah Art Foundation in 2014, involved a galvanised steel pipe snaking around a courtyard, funnelling a continuous flow of air, inspired by the Barjeels (wind towers) of the Middle East. Cenotaph, a series of sculptural ‘pipe sections’ for the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, delved into the history of the city’s hollow underground architecture, including the enigmatic Williamson tunnels and the old dock entombed under the Liverpool One shopping centre. ‘I was thinking about the mucky sides of the city, what we brush under the surface,’ she recalls.