Beautiful Banality: A Profile of Artist Sophie Lourdes Knight
by Justine Rose Armen
WRITTEN in JuNE 2023
‘the dishcloth.’ 2022. oil and acrylic on canvas.
A bright, shiny, oversized red bow floats off-center over six-feet in height. Two giant horse hooves pose - or do they threaten? - on a similarly sized canvas in opaque acrylic. Sophie Lourdes Knight’s paintings are saturated, chromatic, and grandiose. The viewer drifts into liminal space anchored only by the close-up detail of a dishcloth in the wind, a monotone fish, a cowboy hat. While much of her work lives in the surreal, Knight is seeking her real life footing as an artist in London, emerging last year with an MFA in hand from Slade School of Fine Art.
Knight has straddled art communities in California and England for nearly 10 years. Growing up between the Bay Area and London, the pull toward painting, for her, was innate. “[At California College of the Arts] I tried industrial design, I did pattern-making for clothing - I tried lots of different things and all of it just kept leading me back to wanting to make paintings,” explained Knight, “kind of like dumb perseverance or being really strong-headed about it.”
Persistence seems to be the essence of Knight’s practice. She’s curious about sequencing imagery without consideration or infusion of hierarchy. A jade fish-shaped vase; a bag caught blowing against a chair; a horses’ winning ribbons; these depictions next to each other on even scale strike any sensible narrative from the viewers’ brain. “...the minute it’s understood it loses that emotional punch…” Implied context is arbitrary, if not an interference to the viewer. There’s a sense of freedom when taking in Knight’s work. It feels welcoming and generous.
Knight’s work is also a practice in iteration for its own sake. What is to be gained from creating a painting based on a photograph? Sometimes, perhaps, beyond being drawn to beauty or simple curiosity, it’s about ego. “To cycle things physically through your own hands to assert some sort of ownership over them.” But, oftentimes it comes down to simple joy and admiration. Like getting a great song stuck in your head and playing it 1,000 times over. “There’s this unexplainable certainty in particular imagery being really good, like seeing a great photograph and wanting to dissect why it’s so good…by replicating it.” Her practice feels steeped in the very human desire to process things through one’s own hands.
Knights paintings and photographs give a visual experience unlike anything one would see in the day to day, and at the same time, it’s exactly what we see everyday just pared down to its core or most banal components. The object is recognizable - a scarf, a chair - but why is it different? One obvious answer is scale. In much of her work, everyday items are blown way out of proportion - some even exponentially, triggering the viewer to rub one’s eyes in an attempt to focus. There’s often a sense of a refusal to define and an embrace of the imperfect form or shape. The experience can be jarring, but Knight isn’t necessarily trying to elicit a specific response from her work. “I don’t really want anyone to feel like, oh that’s beautiful, or if they think it’s ugly, that’s great too…maybe the worst is if they would think it’s uninteresting. Then you’ve kind of completely bored yourself as well.”
Knight finds inspiration in the everyday. At this stage in her practice, she’s looking less to other artists’ work for guidance or a spark, and more toward the obscure. The literal becomes transcendent. “I went for a walk the other day and someone had spilt a cup of milk on the pavement and then left a pear on top of it and I was like - that’s crazy, that’s definitely a painting.” Knight characterizes her art as “all encompassing…nothing is out of bounds.” And while she doesn’t pursue any particular message through her work, it stays “rooted in the problem of painting,” rendering her art-making an all-enthralling, yet unanswerable question.
Now, since completing her MFA, her next problem has to do with existing as an artist in London. Facing sexism in the art world, Brexit-fueled cultural and economic flux, and a return to more solitary studio work is an adjustment. Today, she’s discovered a new way to share her joy-filled art-making with the world - through teaching. Working as an after-school art teacher for nearly three years has been an additional source of fulfillment for her. “Getting people to be excited about making their own things can be quite healing and empowering.”
Having just wrapped a show at Future Fair New York with Huxley-Parlour Gallery, Knight’s work will next appear in two upcoming group shows: “Full to Bursting” at Staffordshire St (opening June 1) and Kollektiv Collective (opening June 9). See more of her work on her website, www.sophielourdesknight.com.
All images published with permission from the artist.