Hero’s Wreck

Blitz Kid
Essay by Glenn Adamson

I’m writing this in London, looking out my window on to a row of trees, and beyond, a little fenced-in square of green. I walk my dog there every day and know it well. So it was a surprise, recently, when I found a 1939 photograph of my street, and saw that it was lined on both sides with brick warehouses. The buildings on our side remain intact. Of those that once faced them, there is no sign whatsoever. What happened?

Well, they were bombed in the war, of course. Every morning I had been strolling in one of the innumerable such voids that populate London and other cities across Europe. Americans like me aren’t used to that haunting, pervasive non-presence. But for Colin Knight it is quite literally in the blood, despite the fact that he is from Richmond, Virginia.  His British grandmother endured the Blitz, and while growing up he heard her recollections of nightly bombardments and heroic pilots. The stories got deep into him, at once providing an escapist pathway for the imagination, and imbuing him with dread.

These early impressions haven’t let go of Knight, and he hasn’t let go of them either. In college he created a body of work about design in wartime, riffing on emergency stretchers converted to fencing and DIY bomb shelters. His breakthrough was the extraordinary Self-Portrait as a Spitfire (2021), in which a cast of the artist’s own body is set atop a replica of a fighter’s wing based on archival blueprints, all immured in neatly seamed waxed leather. Nominally it is a “daybed,” but in fact no more nocturnal piece of furniture could be conceived. It seems like the direct deposit of a dream, pregnant with meaning, silent as a grave.

The ghosts of past art make themselves felt in it, too: medieval tomb figures; depictions of the shrouded body of Christ; and most proximately, the works of Joseph Beuys, whose obsessive myth-making of his experience as a Nazi tail-gunner attracts and troubles Knight in equal measure. He has made his fraught affinity with Beuys explicit frequently, in works like Wedge Chair (Amidst A Blackout) and Siren Suit (both 2021). For his new exhibition at Superhouse, he embraces a Beuysian palette of materials – wood, fabric, soap, beeswax and leather – and in Rebirth For Two, sets out a tabletop with items tightly strapped down against it, in emulation of Beuys’ Sled (1969). One blue-and-white plate even features a self-portrait of Knight dressed as the German avant gardiste, instantly recognizable in vest and fedora. Despite these direct references, however, there is an important tonal shift from Beuys’ work: necessarily operating at an emotional distance from World War II, Knight responds to it not with pseudo-sacred personal iconography, but rather in the patiently objective manner of an archivist.

Knight’s signature method of making pictures generates this same melancholy yet clear-eyed affect. He first stacks layers of salvaged leather on to a board, building up shapes and leaving voids, then burnishes the leather down into the hollows. The result is a sensitive, negative rendering that eloquently expresses ever-receding collective experience. The most familiar of images – for example, the bent plywood splint that Charles and Ray Eames developed during World War II, which led to their later pioneering modernist furniture – is made strange through the process, as if Knight were showing not the object in question, but the stamp it has left in our mind’s eye. This suggestive transience is materially incarnated by the leather itself, which was once a living substance and is now a dead one. The implicit analogy between the animal’s skin and our own is important; he conveys the fragility of our human membranes (both corporeal and cerebral), and the need we have for ongoing care.

Knight’s earliest leather reliefs were unified compositions drawn from carefully chosen material. Exterior (2023), for example, is directly based on photographs of the Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed by the Luftwaffe. The title knowingly inverts that of Anselm Kiefer’s famous painting Innenraum (“Interior,” 1981), which shows the chancellery of the Nazi Reich similarly destroyed: Knight is revisiting both the war and its subsequent artistic registration. In more recent works, he has further complicated this methodology. Brandwunde (the German word for a burn wound) is composed of three leather panels in blue, brown and black, the colors of a bruise. At the top is a trio of planes which “fly over in a manner ambiguous of attack or rescue,” in the artist’s words, and to the lower right is another building that was bombed in the war, the Vienna State Opera. At lower left, finally, is an impression of a now-lost work by Gustav Klimt, leader of the Viennese Secession, which was stolen from a Jewish family and ultimately destroyed by the retreating German army. These disparate images do create a storyline of sorts, centered on the annihilating effects of Nazification on culture, but it is presented in a remarkably compressed form – as if a whole novel (something in the vein of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps) has been reduced to its barest essence with no loss of profundity.

Knight’s new sculptural works, similarly, see him recrossing past battlefields in an increasingly complex itinerary. Eames’ wartime plywood experimentation (a glider rather than a splint) recurs here, as does the Spitfire, which continues to serve Knight as an allegorical stand-in. The plane’s sleek shapes appear again and again in the Superhouse exhibition. We see a squadron in flight; a fuselage’s contours in a chair; a sectioned wing as a hanging lamp. These fleeting and fragmentary views imply the real story of the Battle of Britain, which has rightly been painted as a valiant defense of a nation – “never was so much owed to so few,” and all that – but was also a terrifying bloodbath. One in every six Spitfire pilots who took to the air never returned, not to mention the 2500 young men of the Luftwaffe who were sent to their deaths.

Knight comes neither to bury nor to praise this terrible episode. Instead he offers us a meditation in which heroism is bound up with trauma, tropes of masculinity with admissions of human vulnerability. This multivalence finds its most elaborated expression in his furniture designs. Survival Raft, whose appended dolls are a nod to the work of the Campana Brothers, suggests a desperate episode at high sea. Pilot’s Seat is another compression of narrative into object form, a front-row seat to imagined aerial combat. Show Your Wound, a sort of sequel to Self-Portrait as a Spitfire, is a snowshoe-like seat with a single sheepskin for comfort, propped up on wooden skids. The expansive backrest – again a cast of Knight’s own body – is draped with army-green leather, its edge ragged. Beuys’ specter is summoned once more, here, alongside those of the doomed airmen.

Ultimately, though, the exhibition’s subject is much broader than its component materials: it is not about World War II, or even the military experience, but rather what it is to be caught up in the churning wheels of history, sometimes propelling us forward, sometimes grinding us in their gears. The “Greatest Generation” would by no means be the last to face unthinkable tragedy, as 2025 has certainly demonstrated. As Knight is well aware, even as visitors take in his subtle and sophisticated work, men and women elsewhere in the world will be dying at the hands of others. It’s a thought I hold on to, too, as I gaze across the street at the empty grass plot. War apparently admits of no end. But what we must never do is forget.

About Colin Knight
Colin Knight is an artist whose practice investigates historical subjects—world wars, mid-20th century design, and Americana—recontextualizing them for the contemporary viewer. Knight's oeuvre spans various mediums, including furniture, reliefs, and sculpture. His self-taught skills—leatherwork, mold-making, and sewing—and the rich symbology of the materials he employs—wood, leather, soap, textiles, plaster, and upholstery—allow him to address themes such as trauma, triumph, myth, and memory. After graduating from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Knight's talent was recognized when he was named a 2020 Windgate-Lamar Fellow by the Center for Craft for his unique reimagining of British Mid-Century Modern design. During his 18-month fellowship, Knight explored the parallels between Blitz-era London and the COVID-19 global pandemic. Following this fellowship, Knight spent time as a furniture resident at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Aspen, USA). Several galleries and institutions have exhibited Knight's work, including the Appalachian Center for Craft (Smithville, USA), Hesse Flatow (New York, USA), Main Projects (Richmond, USA), NCMA Winston-Salem (Winston-Salem, USA), and Superhouse (New York, USA). Learn more.