Henny Burnett is interested in the dynamics of opposites: domestic and industrial, useful and useless, temporary or permanent, beautiful and ugly,. She is a mixed media artist working mainly in sculpture and installation, and focusing on the domestic and everyday.

The artist’s work, ’365 Days of Plastic’ was the start of her investigation of the human impact on the environment through a domestic lens. It is cast from a year’s plastic food packaging from a single household, giving form to our disposable society and plastic dependency.  

Precariousness and fragility

Henny Burnett’s work is increasingly concerned with precariousness and fragility. She uses growing plants that will wither and die and earth that will dry and crumble to dust. ‘A home for my son’ is an ongoing body of work which deals with concepts of belonging and displacement. Simple houses are cast in sustainable and temporary materials such as earth, plant roots and mycelium. The shape of the cast houses echoes Monopoly board pieces. These were once made of wood but are now plastic, which only emphasises ideas inherent to the game about profit, gambling, and winners and losers.

“For the 2023 GroundWork Residency, The Ground Beneath Our Feet, my focus was centred around the extraction methods of building materials in Kings Lynn. I linked their past, present and future. My work was greatly inspired and influenced by a visit to the John Watson collection of building stones at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge. “

Henny Burnett’s resulting work is ‘Blocks of Time,’ referencing both sedimentary rock layers and architectural models. Materials gathered by the artist from quarries near Kings Lynn (Castle Acre chalk quarry and Middleton Aggregates) are bound precariously together in chalk/plaster.

“For me, being part of the GroundWork NetWork would afford networking opportunities and the all important sharing and acquiring of new skills, knowledge and collaborators.”

Henny Burnett’s Previous Projects

Henny Burnett works from her studio in Bristol. She attended Byam Shaw School of Art in London, Fiberworks in Berkeley, California, Edinburgh College of Art and University College London, Institute of Education. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and been awarded numerous grants, commissions and residencies. Henny was lead visual artist on ‘Animating the Archives’, Medieval Library, Salisbury Cathedral funded by Heritage lottery, and ‘National Memory – Local Stories’ a creative participation project led by The National Portrait Gallery, London. The b-side Festival commissioned the audio-visual installation ‘Captain’s Cabinet’ that responded to Portland’s history of shipwrecks.