Slip contains a mirrored, or double ginkgo leaf design, a form inspired by the ginkgo trees in Jeannette Park, which were visible from Indiana’s Coenties Slip loft. The leaves inspired a series of Hard-edge paintings on paper in 1957, and the form was later incorporated into works such as Stavrosis (1958) and The Sweet Mystery (1959–62).
Indiana’s herms were constructed largely from old wooden beams, rusted metal wheels, and other remnants of the shipping trade that he found in his Coenties Slip neighborhood. The wheel on the front of Slip, however, is a rusted tricycle wheel that the artist found in Fire Island, while visiting his friend Arthur Carr, an art collector and professor of Medical Psychiatry at Columbia University.