Take Good Care of My Baby

This artwork featured in In Ruins (2019). 

Holly Hendry’s sculpture stands like a misplaced fragment, all at once at home and foreign. Referencing the notion of the building block, the sculpture utilises the tensions between building up and crumbling away that are present in the work and echoed around the Court. Take Good Care of My Baby reflects on the architecture of spaces and the layering of architectural history.

The artist references the idea of building blocks to let us see those historic building processes that are only revealed when a building falls apart. The idea of the kit also illustrates the way history and culture are made, block on block, one reference after another.

“When making the work, I was looking at restoration processes and how, in these specific ancient sites, the restoration is made obvious, like a giant 3D puzzle. I was thinking about this in terms of the city I was living in at the time (Newcastle), where the city has been put back together and chunks of the old become part of the architecture of the new.”

Holly Hendry carefully considers the outer border or edge of things. The surface, colour and density of materials are all made visible in her sculptures and installations.

Image: Holly Hendry, Take Good Care of My Baby, Plaster, pigment, baby lotion. Installation view, In Ruins, Witley Court, 2019. Image courtesy of Stefan Handy.

 

About the artist

Holly Hendry

Holly Hendry exhibited in In Ruins, Witley Court, 2019.

Image: Holly Hendry, Take Good Care of My Baby, 2014. Plaster, pigment baby lotion. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Stefan Handy.