Anagrammatical Bodies
Holly Hendry’s solo exhibition opens at Toile Blanche Contemporary on 9 April — new cyanotypes and sculpture in a practice that rewards slow looking.
Holly Hendry at Toile Blanche Contemporary
There is a kind of looking that takes time to learn. Holly Hendry’s work demands it.
Anagrammatical Bodies, a solo exhibition of new works by the London-based artist, opens at Toile Blanche Contemporary on 9 April. It is the first major presentation of this body of work, and it arrives at a moment when Hendry’s practice is moving in a direction that is difficult to categorise and worth paying attention to.
The cyanotypes
Hendry’s cyanotypes in this exhibition are not blue. That alone is a decision worth noting. Moving away from the Prussian blue that defines the medium, these works are rendered in black and white — closer to a medical x-ray than a photographic print, closer to an architectural drawing than either. The body appears in fragments: limbs, surfaces, cryptic speech bubbles arranged and rearranged across the picture plane. The same shapes recur in different configurations, so that looking at one work changes how you read the next. Nothing is fixed. Everything is in the process of meaning something slightly different.
The cut-out is central to how these works operate. Hendry removes, repositions, returns. The result is a field of shifted meaning — the kind of image that takes on a different character depending on where you stand and how long you stay with it.
The sculptures
Two sculptural works accompany the cyanotypes. Built from glass, metal and wood, they occupy the same theoretical territory as the prints — the anagrammatical body, constructed from recognisable parts but radically reconfigured into something new. Hybrid forms. Known materials, unknown conclusions.
There is something worth knowing about how these works will arrive. At the time of writing, Hendry is waiting for the ceramic components to come out of the kiln. The final glazes, the definitive configuration — these will be determined at the last possible moment. The sculptures that open on 9 April will be, in a real sense, finished only hours before they are seen. That is not a caveat. It is the work.
Film
Toile Blanche Contemporary
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Anagrammatical Bodies runs from 9 April 2026.