theCOLAB is delighted to announce Slackwater, Holly Hendry’s first public commission in London and her most expansive to date. Made for The Artist’s Garden, this site-specific work occupies the vast terrace on the roof of Temple Underground station. The project continues theCOLAB’s dedication to commissioning innovative contemporary installations by women artists within this unique, half-acre site. The Artist’s Garden has been realised in close partnership with Westminster City Council since 2021.

Slackwater will emerge as an immense sculptural entanglement that weaves together the watery history of its riverside location, with references to the abstract rhythms of the Thames and liquid movements within the human body. In conceiving the work, Hendry was drawn to changes in the pattern of the river’s surface; after slackwater, when an incoming tide meets the fluvial flow, water stills, and then eddies – whirlpooling against the main direction of the flow – before pursuing its course upstream. Constructed with industrial-scale ducting, curled around electricity spools and over casts of inflated boat fenders, the work ebbs and flows across the site’s architecture.  The artist’s visual language brings together both scientific research and cartoon imagery. Its pastel tones and exaggerated forms are drawn from ancient depictions of floods and rivers, and 19th century microscopic images of Thames water, described as ‘monster soup’, a bacterial slurry teeming with surreal, animated forms.    

Hendry’s Slackwater lifts the lid on The Artist’s Garden, drawing up all that flows around, beneath and through us. The roof terrace is part of the Victoria Embankment, a bold reclamation of land beside the Thames conceived and built by Sir Joseph Bazalgette between 1865–1870 to resolve the ‘Great Stink’. This feat of Victorian engineering turned muddy foreshores into public spaces, with roads and walkways overhead, and tunnels for trains, water and waste beneath, creating a new edge, or in weaving terms ‘temple’ for London.  Slackwater draws together the rhythms of subterranean, bodily and narrative flows of the city, its people and places to become a ‘sculpture as an interrupter’ to our everyday routes, inviting us to criss-cross the work’s anatomy and be borne along by its internal flow.