Sophie Lourdes Knight:At Rest

At Rest magnifies an anatomical detail of a horse’s hooves and forlocks. Depicted against a plain backdrop of cool grey, Knight emphasises the form of the feet and offers the viewer an undisrupted field in which to contemplate the subject matter. By cropping the horse’s legs and feet and detaching them from the rest of the animal’s body, Knight decontextualises her subject matter, creating an alternative spatial dimension on the canvas, detached from the traditional spatial dimension of the everyday. The artist’s smooth, sweeping brushstrokes lend the painting its sense of monumentality and texture. Poignantly, Knight titles the work At Rest, depicting the horse’s feet in a classical stance of repose; the artist creates a quiet moment for contemplation for objects that we would usually expect to see moving.