EXHIBITION

Short-Term Storage

Cork Street Galleries, London, London, 10/13/2016 - 10/22/2016

Limoncello 34 Cork Street London W1S 3NU

ABOUT

Limoncello Mayfair doesn’t quite fit. We’re too East End, too young, and one of us commutes into Liverpool Street. But… when offered this beautiful Mayfair gallery for a short period, we asked Holly Hendry and Kate Owens to make an exhibition, in a spare but bold installation. We flippantly pitched it to the The Pollen Estate as two artists who make big work, big sculpture, strong but soft. Which is a lazy, useless description, but, we are a bit lazy and useless sometimes. And anyway, it does work as a 11 word summary.

Kate Owens’ work in progress ‘Full Drop, Half Drop, Brick, Spot, Diamond, Triangle, Stripe, Hexagon, Ogee, Scale, Mirror, Turn-over, Swiss, Tossed, All-over’ is a swimming pool-sized roll of fabric, onto which she prints both a tile pattern and her daily borrowings from her local pool. From hair bands and bobby pins to used plasters and goggle parts, Owens seeks and removes the objects from the pool’s bottom; she screen-prints them in her makeshift bathroom print studio, then returns them to the pool. She’s 17 metres in to making the 50 metre piece and ‘Short-term Storage’ is its first showing. It will take a while to finish. There are many aspects to it: the performativity, duration, make-do making, awkwardness of the huge object and obstinate challenges of its display, all of which can be explored to articulate words in relation to the piece. But, actually, it’s the nature of her borrowing that is most attractive; the idea of foraging precious rubbish, using it and returning it. A cyclicality to her activity that makes it both wholesome and peculiar. Which is a good way in to thinking about of a lot of works in Owens’ humbly magnificent practice.

Standing as an obstacle to the front door is Owens’ car-crashed barrier piece; designed, made, crashed into, then painted in ‘sea-side town’ blue. The rough abuse of her object is contrasted in Holly Hendry’s floor to ceiling, beanpole metal sculpture with its tiny comedy bite mark. Contrasted, but forming allegiance as well, in their shared idea of metal as an uncannily manipulable material. Hendry’s ‘Gut Feelings (Stromatolith)’ is an open-sided, metal-topped block that houses a geology of oozy, foamy, cotton candy-coloured poured plaster, lumpy grey cement and laser cut birch ply; each strata borrowing its seemingly flabby form from its neighbour. Peppered within the layers are erroneous elements; metal props, rock salt, marble chunks, chewing gum, lipstick, and again comically sculptural dog chew bones and spinning plaster teeth. Organic and synthetic have osmosed and forms and surfaces are not dependable. Hendry’s work is a decadent material assault that holds an immense (and smile-inducing) satisfaction; it can be tangibly felt by the viewer’s eyes alone.

We are delighted to announce that we now represent Holly Hendry, this is her first exhibition with Limoncello.

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Kate Owens

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