Invertebrate

Holly Hendry has created Invertebrate, a new work for Waterfronts, commissioned in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill as part of England’s Creative Coast.

‘Invertebrate’ is a giant composite form that has wormed its way around the outside of De La Warr Pavilion, stretching from the seafront lawn to the first floor balcony and the roof; while inside an accompanying exhibition by Hendry titled ‘Indifferent Deep’ shows the after-effects of the invertebrate’s actions, the gallery walls apparently munched and excavated.

The worm’s anatomy joins together different materials that resonate with the Bexhill pavilion’s seaside location. Sandbags made out of boating canvas, wrinkly and filled with pale local sand, connect with segments made using the casting techniques used to create tetrapod sea defences.

These join onto wobbly metal ducting and sections in brick, the contrasting materiality of each segment conveying corporality and vulnerability to the elements. Hendry’s invertebrate form is a metaphor for precarity and change. It suggests hydrological functions both small and large — the transition of stone to sand and sand to glass, for instance — and notions of decomposition and re-emulsification essential to organic renewal.

In successfully invading the De La Warr Pavilion, Hendry’s invertebrate reimagines the iconic modernist building as a porous body. Her inspiration comes from her fascination with borders: “Making an artwork for Waterfronts, for me, is a consideration of edges,” Hendry has explained. “This deals with ideas of above and below, inside and outside, on the land, in the sea or under the ground. Edges seem to be definitive, a beginning or an end, a perimeter of sorts, and a line that highlights contested notions of ownership and free movement.

“Strange things have been revealing themselves in Bexhill-on-Sea, and further afield, like the wreck of the Amsterdam on Bulverhythe beach, dinosaur fossils in the Bexhill brickworks and environmental effects of our own waste materials. To make an artwork for Waterfronts is to consider our horizontal or flat perspectives to think about things more deeply than the surface world.”

About the artist
Holly Hendry (b. 1990, London, UK) graduated from The Royal College of Art in 2016 and has since become one of the most exciting young artists in the UK. Hendry is interested in defining the architecture of spaces by exploring the possibilities, such as surface, colour and density, inherent in a wide range of materials through her installations. The shifting scales and unusual positioning of her often-monumental works encourage visitors to consider sculpture in dialogue with their surroundings, whilst also considering absence as hollow spaces or voids.