‘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.