Evacuating a two-up two-down 1970s council home seems like overkill for a weekend pop-up exhibition. A visitor who makes it past Knowlden’s steel spike sculpture – like an exhausted porcupine held together only by zip ties – that arrests would-be deniers in the property’s sunken garden, soon understands that there was no other way: the artist is an architect.
Inside, graphite and acrylic drawings, made more by erasing Knowlden’s hand than applying it, try to be subtle. This is a planner’s old trick; in art, it spared not even de Kooning. Smears, smudges, and transparencies – these images float suspended from shelf edges, sandwiched in glass panes, hung next to the kitchen island – stand out too confidently even against the house’s bright blue vinyl flooring.
The scene’s ease of means is seductive. Yet the austerity of this assembly is feigned, and it reveals that Knowlden’s is an ill-conceived war plan. Too little is at stake here: the porcupine lost its spines in vain.
