Colin Knight’s Conspirators is a single sculptural frame subdivided into three relief sections, each formed by shaped imagery built up beneath dyed, stretched leather. This labor-intensive process—Knight’s signature technique—creates ghosted, dimensional surfaces that hover between visibility and concealment, history and memory.
The triptych draws inspiration from the 1940 film Conspiratori, and more poignantly, from the real-life story of its star, Hedy Lamarr. Knight weaves together three interconnected images: Lamarr in a romantic film embrace, a torpedo (referencing her co-invention of frequency-hopping signal technology), and a sunken airplane (evoking wartime sacrifice and submerged histories). Lamarr’s radical wartime contributions—fleeing an arms-dealing husband, selling war bonds, and developing technology foundational to GPS and Bluetooth—are reimagined here in abstracted form.
By layering sculptural process with cinematic reference and geopolitical history, Knight reveals how design, myth, and conflict intertwine. The leather, once stretched over the built forms, becomes a skin of remembrance—marked, shaped, but not wholly transparent. Conspirators invites the viewer to reckon with what is seen, what is buried, and what stories deserve to be retold.