‘The Cenote Ring’, Paola Estrella
HS Projects is delighted to present The Cenote Ring, an exhibition of recent works by Mexican artist Paola Estrella.
The Cenote Ring is a two-part project by multimedia artist Paola Estrella, 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.
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.
‘The Botanist’, Myfanwy MacLeod
HS Projects is delighted to present The Botanist, an exhibition of recent works by Myfanwy MacLeod, not shown in London before, that serve to reconcile us with the botanical world, magnifying the interdependency and symbiotic relationship between plants and humans.
At the centre of the exhibition is ‘Fallen’, a monumental wooden sculpture depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Inspired by a small historical sculpture from the collection of the Gherdëina Museum in Ortisei, Italy, an apple is held by Eve and fallen fruit lies at the feet of the figures. However, the Tree of Knowledge is felled.
Within a forest of stumps, Adam and Eve appear as mascot-like stewards of a tree-less anthropocentric paradise. Non-human beings often appear as backdrops to our lives, yet here carved from wood, Myfanwy reminds us that Adam and Eve’s presence is inextricably connected to the trees that are absent she asks how can our kinship with non-human life create the conditions for our mutual survival?
The proliferation and control of nature is explored in ‘Pink Rot’, an installation of identically cast potatoes. The title of the work refers to the pink rot potato disease which is endemic in soils where the crop is repeatedly grown. While genetic modifications may counter disease and increase yield, the impact of intensive farming on soil erosion and biodiversity is still held within the land. The potatoes of ‘Pink Rot’ are witness to this – alluringly pink, cloned immaculately, though heavy and dead. Using the language of minimalism and pop-art, Myfanwy creates an unsettling monument to our agro-ecologies.
An emblem of intertwined yellow tulips features on the hand-painted flag, ‘Figure of a Woman’, a riff on satirical heraldic flags found in the allegorical artworks of Hendrik Gerritsz Pot’s painting ‘Wagon of Fools’ (circa 1632) and Pieter Nolpe’s etching ‘Flora’s Fool’s Cap’ (circa 1637) which mock the craze of Tulipmania in Holland during the 1630s. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, features in both of these historical works, symbolic of the gendered conventions of flowers her presence also feminises the folly of Tulipmania. In contrast to these works, Myfanwy’s flag asks us to reconsider the feverish impulses of Tulipmania. It communicates the commoditisation of plant life to serve speculation agendas. It can also be interpreted as a flag for Flora, giving status to her powerful identity that crosses the threshold between humans and plants.
Myfanwy MacLeod has exhibited her work throughout Canada, Australia, the United States and Europe.
Solo exhibitions include Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales (2023); Canada House, London, UK (2019); Or Gallery, Vancouver (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery (2014); Museum London, London, ON (2013); Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2012); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2006).
Selected group exhibitions include the Biennale Gherdëina, Ortisei, Italy (2020) Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2013); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA (2012); Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2008); Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany (2004); The Power Plant, Toronto; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburg; Gasworks, London, UK (2002); Canadian Pavilion, Melbourne International Biennial, Australia (1999); and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (1998).
‘The Botanist’ is at Howick Place from December 2024 to June 2025.