- Sophie Lourdes Knight
- i want bells to peal
- Brentford, London
- 4th July 2024, 12.46 BST
i want bells to peal is an air-dry clay and mixed-media sculpture by Sophie Lourdes Knight situated in a parked 1981 Volkswagen Golf GTI in Brentford between 12.46 and 13.56 BST on the 4th July 2024.
A small car park serves the blocks of flats which overlook the River Brent as it joins the Thames, shielded from the waterside so that you would never know the river was there. It is home to a prized 1981 Golf which stands out among the other cars, aged by the boxier shape particular to the period. As it happens, I have recently been rewatching Life on Mars, the time-travelling detective series which sends John Simm back to 1973, swapping his Jeep Grand Cherokee for a Ford Contina. The Golf dropped Knight and myself back in time too, a tactic through which to explore the re-contextualisation of familiar objects central to her practice.
Hanging above the boot lid, the shiny dish of a ceramic surface reflects dapples of light onto the roof of the car. Below it, a collection of trinkets twist slowly in the breeze: a miniature lightbulb with a reflective base, a golden heart-shaped lock and key, a clay cut-out of an air freshener tree. The bulb suggests the dish above is a descendent of a lampshade, offering an explanation for a form whose function has been otherwise adapted. The rest of the more decorative components seem to come from the same world as fuzzy dice hanging from a rear-view mirror and beaded seat covers. i want bells to peal is straddling different, but closely related, languages of intimacy: the furniture expected of a domestic space, or the trinkets which adorn the inside of a car. With the engine running in the car park, a type of nostalgia which smells like teenage idleness drifts into the back seat. The work is speaking to younger days of sitting around with not much to do. The retro stripes of the red and black back seat remind us that these days did not belong to us, more familiar from television than from life. The lamp-like object is a prop, performing in an older version of reality.
Knight draws this relationship to reality with the title of the sculpture, lifted from Clarice Lispector’s 1977 The Hour of the Star — “Even though to get me going I want bells to peal while I guess at reality”. This sentiment, of a detachment from reality coinciding with a desire for celebration captures the dual nature of the work: grounded in the form of a familiar object, but intentionally distracted from function by its own decoration. i want bells to peal is speaking to a desire for celebratory gestures housed in simple forms, like tin cans jangling off the back of a car as it drives away from the church on a wedding day. Perhaps as the Golf finally revs into gear the boot will pop open, flinging the collection of trinkets out behind it to bounce around, ringing like bells. Pealing like bells, I should say. The much more purposeful performance of change ringing which Lispector references echoes in Knight’s intentional choice of objects, a mixture of personal and generic, as if to question how meaning is bestowed on items at all.
This engagement with objects filters through Knight’s wider painting practice. Belt buckles, shoes, plates and cups, candlesticks, and hankies bounce around canvases. Sometimes suspended in mid-air, like the dishcloth (2022) with its blue and white checks floating below a cowboy hat, and sometimes embedded in strange, surreal scenes like the cabbageware (2024), an enormous studded belt buckle wrapped around a bulging green background, above a collection of cabbageware jugs, plates and cups. The scenes sit somewhere between still life, portraiture, and advertising, Knights skilfully disrupting expected narratives or presentations of objects. How objects can be re-contextualised within the world of painting, becoming symbolic or cinematic, finds its three-dimensional equivalent in i want bells to peal. The brightly coloured seats of the Golf seem to naturally mimic the backdrop of many of the paintings; Knight’s world expanding into the backseat of the car.
Sophie Lourdes Knight is a multidisciplinary artist from California, USA. She studied at California College of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 2014, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with an MFA in 2022. Knight's work attempts to disrupt the hierarchical economy of value within the world of objects. By placing overlooked, everyday items alongside spectacular things of beauty she establishes them as on a level plane.
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