Posts Categorized: Exhibitions
‘The Cenote Ring’, Paola Estrella
HS Projects is delighted to present The Cenote Ring, an exhibition of recent works by Mexican multimedia artist Paola Estrella.
The Cenote Ring is a two-part project unfolding across distinct spaces and mediums to explore the cenotes—natural sinkholes formed by the impact of an asteroid over 66 million years ago. Scattered across the Yucatán Peninsula, these interconnected sites make up the geological formation known as the cenote ring.
Bridging collaboration, ritual, and storytelling, the project comprises a collaborative performance at Stone Nest, London and a solo painting exhibition at 5 Howick Place, London. Though presented separately, both are conceptually intertwined—inviting audiences to move between myth and material, the ephemeral and the pictorial.
Reflecting on the geological, spiritual, and mythological, rooted in the cenote ring of Yucatán, Mexico, The Cenote Ring emerges from a fascination with the subterranean waters formed by an ancient asteroid impact, which become portals that ripple through Mayan cosmology as spaces of transition, remembrance, and rebirth. These sacred sinkholes are echo chambers, carrying layered voices of the land, ancestors, and non-human worlds across time.
The project listens and captures what remains: traces of planetary memory, suppressed cosmologies and alternative ways of seeing. It becomes a site for collective meditation, an invitation to unlearn extractive world views and attune ourselves to observation, cyclical rhythms of grief and renewal to coexist with other species.
Estrella’s The Cenote Ring, was performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum East; Stone Nest in London’s West End and it will open the MIRA (Latin American Art Fair) in Paris this November. Estrella has also performed at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Goldsmiths; South London Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, where she is currently artist-in-residence with the collective Diasporas Now.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in a range of institutions, such as the Museum of Mexico City, Franz Mayer Museum, Saatchi Gallery and Somers Gallery. She was selected for New Contemporaries in 2022, and her work was featured in White Cube’s Tomorrow: London programme in 2020. Estrella holds an MA from the Royal College of Art.
This project has been made possible thanks to support from the Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants, and Artists Make Space Programme at Orleans House Gallery.
The Cenote Ring is at Howick Place from 20th June 2025 to 12th December 2025.
‘Monuments to a Vanishing’, Henrietta Armstrong
HS Projects is delighted to present Monument to a Vanishing, an exhibition of recent work by Henrietta Armstrong that explores themes of climate collapse, erosion both physical and cultural and the fragility of the natural world. The exhibition builds on Henrietta Armstrong’s ongoing engagement with coastal defence systems, sacred natural forms, and the relationship between play, prophecy, and protection.
The title speaks to the dual nature of the works, as both physical objects and symbolic gestures. A “monument” typically implies permanence and remembrance. Here, Armstrong reimagines monuments as fragile, impermanent, and often fabricated reconstructions of what is already slipping from reach. The “vanishing” is ecological, emotional, and cultural, from disappearing coastlines and forests to the erosion of myth, ritual, and memory in a world driven by speed and erasure. Each work becomes a kind of offering, a marker for something under threat or already lost.
At the centre is THROWING BONES II, an installation of 50 interlocking white plaster forms, inspired by the Dolos geometric concrete blocks used in sea defences and named after ox knuckle bones used in Southern African divination. These forms, resembling protective structures or ritual bones, echo ancient games and rites, suggesting a tension between control and chaos, wisdom and chance. Their surface transforms with the light, hinting at impermanence, echoed in the precarious way the forms lean on each other. As climate change accelerates coastal erosion, a process that could see half the world’s sandy beaches disappear by 2100, these skeletal shapes become both a defence mechanism and a memorial to what’s slipping away.
FOSSIL TREE, a cast of a felled oak in aluminium powder and fibreglass, originated from a tree uprooted in the storms of 2021. It presents a future where trees survive only as relics, fossilised by human intervention. Drawing on cultural symbolism of trees as divine, Armstrong warns of the myths we’re building from what’s already lost.
Two vivid, geometric paintings zoom in on the Dolos form, amplifying its blocky, toy-like shape. Armstrong shifts from sculpture to surface, using colour and abstraction to reframe the Dolos as both playful and ominous like coded warnings from a speculative future. Throwing Bones, an earlier, more intimate version of the plaster installation, includes a sea-printed fabric backdrop, a visual portal that deepens the dialogue between fragility and force, nostalgia and inevitability. It feels like a dream fragment, a smaller premonition of the scale of disappearance to come.
Gathered under Monuments to a Vanishing, these works ask us to confront our complicity and vulnerability. These are not monuments to the past, but to the present already half-lost, slipping through our fingers.
Henrietta Armstrong MRSS (b. 1981, Devon) studied BA Fine Art at Sir John Cass School of Art.
She was a finalist for the National Sculpture Prize 2021 and runner-up for the Soho House Art Prize 2020/21. Her work is part of the Soho House permanent collection.
Recent exhibitions include Entangled (Saatchi Gallery), Sex Sells (Berlin), SANCTUM FUTURUM (Margate), and Throwing Bones II (The Scalpel Building, London).
‘Monument to a Vanishing’ is at 12 Hammersmith Grove from May 2025 to November 2025.
Q&A, A Discussion between Annie Trevorah & Jo Baring
A discussion on the exhibition and practice of Annie Trevorah with Jo Baring on May 14th, 7:00pm at 12 Hammersmith Grove
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