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A mobile sculpture made from synthetic skin-like material has been installed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. Opening this Saturday, Holly Hendry’s exhibition, The Dump is Full of Images, is a partnership between art and science exploring themes of decay, the body and reusing materials.
Named after an epilogue in American writer Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing, which explores the relationship between technology and culture, the exhibition’s main work uses material made from thermoplastics developed by Prof Parikshit Goswami for use as replacement skin.
The collaboration with Goswami, based at Huddersfield University, whom Hendry describes as a “scientific magician”, began as a discussion about the potential of materials and how to reuse them in different ways. Slacker, the main sculpture, depicts a body lying down. It consists of the skin-like material printed with anatomical imagery being fed through a series of supermarket-style conveyor belts in a “regurgitatory motion” to create a “rotational autopsy of innards”.
Hendry poured silicon onto conveyor fabric and mixed it with rubbish lying around her studio, such as bottle tops or plastic pens, and then remixed it with leftovers or residue from mixing material in the bottom of buckets.
The smaller works in the exhibition also use recycled materials, such as plasterboard and locally-sourced sheep’s wool, otherwise destined for incineration. Hendry says that one of the joys of working with Goswami was that they would “approach similar ideas in totally opposite ways”. Goswami intends to turn the wool into textiles, Hendry is turning it in art.
The crossover of the different worlds of art and science were a joy but also a challenge, says Hendry. “His way of working is totally practical, it’s funny how what I make is almost the opposite of that; it’s totally impractical but deals with the same issues. We were able to have these amazing conversations about the ideas of touch and material sustainability and skins and reusing materials. He’s used to practical outcomes that have meaning, whereas I can go off on a tangent and interpret ideas in strange ways.”
Although the work investigates the ideas of excess, the build-up of material in the world, how we choose what we keep and what we see as rubbish, Hendry says she doesn’t want the exhibition in the park’s Weston visitor centre to be “preaching environment sustainability”. She says: “I don’t think there’s the intention of a specific political message in the sculptures. I feel that would be contradictory anyway, as I’m using material to make the work.”
In contrast, The Garden of Good and Evil, by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, which also opens on Saturday, overtly aims to provoke discussion of humanitarian trauma and politics of image-making. The work, a new permanent collection at the YSP, features ten steel cells, which reference CIA “black sites” or secret detention facilities around the world. The cells, originally exhibited in 2017 in a different formation, are now dispersed around the 500-acre park, installed within the woodland and partially submerged in one of the lakes, as if reclaimed by the land.
Each cell, deliberated aged and rusted by the weather, has a one-metre-square base inspired by the poem, One Square Metre of Prison (1986) by Palestinian poet and activist Mahmoud Darwish, who spent much of his adult life in solitary confinement and in exile. The work is donated by the organisation, a/political, which supports artists working within a socio-political framework.
Unveiled on the UN International Day of Peace, the works are accompanied by a book, featuring essays by visual theorist ProfGriselda Pollock and curator Prof Jon Bird.
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