AnOther World: Artist Henry Svendsen’s Deptford Workshop

Inside a south-east London railway arch, Henry Svendsen is building his most ambitious work yet. Ahead of Lovers Hold opening at the V&A, the artist talks about unruly materials and queer space

“I feel like I’ve been living here for two months,” Henry Svendsen tells me, only half joking, as we tiptoe our way through a minefield of workshop detritus. It’s a warm Friday morning in August, and I suddenly become aware of a pair of eyes following me around the high-ceilinged railway arch where the London-based artist has been making his latest work. Perched high on a shelf is the unmistakable figure of Kate Moss, rendered in mottled grey plaster so that she looks like an ancient victim of Pompeii. A chunk has been knocked from one of her arms. Svendsen meets my gaze with a knowing look. “She’s seen better days,” he says, deadpan.

In fact, the cast is just one of a number of famous facsimiles dotted around the artist’s temporary studio. The south-east London railway arch belongs to Arteffects, a team of craftspeople specialising in cold casting and mould-making for some of contemporary art’s biggest names. Its extensive floor space and surfaces are littered with the tools and remnants of these resolutely messy processes. Rubber gloves discarded next to half-used bottles of silicone mark the sites of recent experiments; below them, paint-spattered buckets overflow with hardened foam like giant toadstools on the floor. Earlier this year, the workshop’s owner, Steve Haines, invited Svendsen to take up an unofficial residency of sorts after he got in touch looking for production advice for his latest work, Lovers Hold (2026). 

Given the scale of the workshop and the wealth of expertise on offer, it is little surprise that the resulting work is Svendsen’s most ambitious yet. “This is more space than I’ve ever had to work in,” he tells me, leading me through what feels like a labyrinth, areas of which are eerily lit by jaundiced skylights. We round a corner and are immediately confronted by a life-size cast of a horse. “I’ve been here almost every day, just working by myself,” he continues, noticing my mildly startled reaction, “I’m used to … this.”

We enter another archway and slowly begin to circle the two austere, plinth-like structures of Lovers Hold, which are sitting expectantly on wooden pallets, awaiting their finishing touches. Measuring more than two metres at their longest and tallest extremes, they possess the imposing proportions of architectural fragments while remaining ambiguous enough to invite another question: what exactly are you supposed to do with them?

“It started with kissing chairs,” Svendsen tells me. “Kissing chairs are obviously pieces of furniture,” the artist continues, “but they directly inform and create relationships between the people that are engaging with them.” For Svendsen, furniture can be a form of persuasion: an object that instructs the body where to sit, lean, touch or move closer to somebody else. With Lovers Hold, its amorphous-yet-ergonomic resin surface invites users to comfortably sit, recline and connect.

This preoccupation with bodies and built space has followed Svendsen since his training as an architect at UCL’s Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and his subsequent move to Los Angeles, where he worked at architecture firm Morphosis. Later, while designing immersive environments and furniture for fashion brands, he began making sculptural objects of his own. A sheet-metal horse devised during a stint at Burberry became an unexpected turning point after the brand commissioned versions for its flagship stores. “It gave me the confidence and the permission to dive into this practice I’d been wanting to explore for a long time,” he says.

He now maintains a small, white-walled studio in Hackney, primarily for research and development, but Lovers Hold required an altogether messier environment. Here, in the Deptford studio, making happens at full scale. The wealth of tools, materials and guidance from Haines and his team allowed Svendsen to experiment with abandon, moving away from the rigour of his architectural roots towards something altogether more fluid.

Across the sleek surfaces of Lovers Hold, a black substance appears to ooze like molten rock. Looking around, I realise that the studio is strewn with numerous prototypes for this finish, which hang off tables like cake batter frozen mid-spill. In the work, its elemental presence creates a collision between two key modes of abstraction: the mechanical and the organic. It also feels like a perfect illustration of Svendsen’s desire to turn his training on its head. He picks up one of the fragmented pieces of foam. It still appears liquid. “This materiality I’m working with now, there’s a lot of metal, it’s quite monolithic and I like that sense of permanence. But it also feels very anti-architecture to be using material like this in this way.”

The work’s organic contours are achieved by pouring polyurethane over a formwork and leaving their final shape largely up to gravity. “I’m leaning into unpredictability,” he says. “I mean, there were some days I was screaming and crying because you really can’t control what it does, but I like the irony of creating something that feels really organic with this toxic material full of chemicals.”

His earlier sculptures approached similar ideas on a more intimate scale. Bent (2024), a knife-sharp sculptural chair, was photographed being climbed over and occupied by choreographer Harry Price. For Handle (2025), Svendsen took the monolithic forms of bollards and classical sculptural supports and softened their authority with leather-clad handles and surfaces designed for the body to drape itself across. “Their only real function is flirtation and seduction,” he says. “It’s inspired by street architecture, and the way those things become enlivened with a sense of eroticism if someone is leaning on them, perhaps having a cigarette, or inviting someone else to join them.”

At Arteffects, those ideas have become a kind of landscape. Once the black resin on Lovers Hold had found its final shape, Svendsen began marking its surface with evidence of imagined bodies. Finger-, fist- and footprints interrupt the sculpture, suggesting activities that move between the convivial and the carnal. The bodies themselves are present elsewhere in the studio. Photographs by Alvin Baltrop and Félix González-Torres are pinned to boards leaning against the walls, alongside print-outs of Keith Vaughan’s abstract group portraits. Baltrop’s images of queer life around New York’s abandoned Hudson River piers are particularly resonant with a work concerned with how seemingly anonymous pieces of architecture can be given private meanings by the people who occupy them. The pictures are not simply references: Svendsen looks to them to imagine how bodies might eventually congregate around his own sculpture.

All this will happen at the V&A, where Lovers Hold will sit, inviting interaction, from 11 September to 19 October. “I want it to feel like a portal,” Svendsen says as we near the end of our conversation. “For certain people and a certain form of engagement; a gathering, being supported by this morphing, liquid form.” To some, Lovers Hold might simply appear to be an unoccupied plinth awaiting its statue, a version of those that will surround it in the V&A’s classical sculpture gallery. Just as a stretch of beach or woodland, or a train station toilet, might appear empty, insignificant. But to those who recognise the subtle signs, it can offer a world of suggestion and connection.