Holly Hendry Floorr Artist Interviews

 


"the cross section gives the inside an edge. It is a cut and slice to learn and reveal."























 








Could you tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a practicing artist and where did you study?

I studied my BA at the Slade School of Art in London, then lived in Newcastle after graduating. More recently I completed my MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember but considering the possibility of being a practicing artist came while studying, so I would say that I’ve been a practicing artist since then.
Your sculptures give the appearance of the body/flesh being constricted or cut/sliced through, could you tell us about these works and the inspiration for them?

The thinking and making for these works revolves around edges - architectural edges, body edges, the meeting of edges, the puncture of edges. Edges also relate to the inside and outside of things, skins, messiness and tidiness and when and people’s edges can be interchangeable or porous. In this way, the idea of the edge, to me, defines or outlines where something is – so they’re really about absences and presences through borders. I’m interested in our own edges and this literal or imagined membrane that surrounds us, and other things when these contours shift and morph, or turn inside of themselves.



























In my sculptures, such as the Gut Feelings works, the cross section gives the inside an edge. It is a cut and slice to learn and reveal. A lot of the time I use architectural drawings or plans to technically work out the larger sculptures, and I have used motifs from these drawings, and the architectural drawings of my Dad, in some past works. I have also recently been looking at a lot of my partner’s medical books where diagrams show our internal workings or methods of fixing to keep us alive longer. Both the architectural drawings and anatomical cross sections are examples of a segment of a thing. They are turning a 3d object into a 2d image, in the same way ancient remains in a museum may be sliced in half and displayed for us to learn from, and to prove its authenticity.
For my recent work Wrot (shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) the slice was significant within the entire installation. The work on the whole acknowledges this idea of surfaces and peripheries but I used the cut in a literal sense to slice through the architecture. The cross-sectional layers also referenced archaeology and burial, so all of the objects contained within the layers existed on the flat plane of the cross section - as if they were held within the flatness of the surface. The making is very tied to this, as the works are formed by pouring materials into moulds, so this invisible surface is a trace of this process too, a previous supporting skin that has been removed.








































































































Wrot,2017 at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (c) Mark Pinder






























































































Nasothek, 2017 (c) Alastair Philip Wiper