Exhibition Review: Amartey Golding, Silent Knight, at FACT Liverpool
A Chain of Voices, Heard in Stillness…
Step into FACT Liverpool’s Gallery 2 and you’re met with a silver spectacle — an arresting, sculptural form that draws you in and doesn’t let go. At its heart stands Silent Knight, a collaborative centrepiece by artist Amartey Golding, and the final commission in FACT’s powerful Resolution project. Its presence is undeniable — physically, emotionally, politically.
Constructed in collaboration with over 50 incarcerated men from HMP Altcourse, Silent Knight takes the form of a towering suit of hand-forged chainmail, assembled link by link through stories, sketches, and conversations exchanged across two years inside the prison’s walls. The weight it carries is more than material — it’s symbolic. A burden of trauma, protection, vulnerability, and the contradictions of a justice system too often built to punish, not understand.
The gallery itself takes on the feel of a chapel. Pews face the armoured figure in quiet assembly, inviting stillness, reflection — or perhaps even a court of unspoken judgement. That ambiguity is deliberate. Golding doesn’t hand you an answer. He offers a space for questions. What are we protecting? Who is allowed to feel safe? Who gets heard?
The atmosphere is further unsettled by the ghostly soundtrack playing during my visit — a slowed-down, dissonant version of We’ll Meet Again, haunting and out of phase. It echoes the condition of those who helped shape the piece: present but displaced, essential but overlooked.
Unlike the many well-meaning projects that parachute into marginalised spaces to extract content and exhibit it elsewhere, Golding flips the script. Silent Knight was first shown inside HMP Altcourse. The men who shaped it were not just participants — they were the first audience. The dignity of that choice reverberates throughout the piece.
Golding, himself once a YMCA resident, approached the prison not as a reformer or moralist, but as a listener. He didn’t force neat narratives. Bureaucratic chaos, rotating groups and shifting prison schedules meant that the process was never fixed — but that became its strength. From fragments — symbols on paper, marks of memory, gestures of identity — came the fabric of the work. Stories stitched into steel. Whispers forged into form.
Armour is the perfect metaphor. It shields, but it constricts. It’s at once beautiful and brutal, sacred yet sorrowful. “Protection and vulnerability, violence and care,” Golding says — and Silent Knight contains all of it in stillness. It is a presence that both confronts and invites.
But this isn’t just a form made of pain. It is also built on patience, on tenderness. It’s an astonishing technical achievement. It gestures toward the slow, repetitive acts of sewing and shaping as a kind of survival — a resistance to institutional erasure. The longer you sit with Silent Knight, the more it opens up. It absorbs you. You don’t just observe it —
you’re drawn into its orbit. And when you do look closer, beneath the skirt of chainmail, a ring of trainers grounds the work in real people, real lives. A small detail, but quietly devastating. Dignity, empathy, defiance — all held in one still shape.
Despite its monumental feel, Silent Knight doesn’t demand attention with volume. It stands. It listens. It holds space — and in doing so, it asks us to give something that those in prison are so rarely afforded: time. This is not a work to glance at on your way to something else. It asks you to stay. To feel. To sit with discomfort. To listen without judgment.
In the end, Silent Knight is more than an artwork. It is a monument to collective voice, to care over spectacle, to the invisible labour of those surviving systems not designed for them. For FACT, for Liverpool, and for everyone willing to really see it, Silent Knight leaves an imprint. It doesn’t just change what you see. It changes how you listen.
Amartey Golding Silent Knight runs until 10 August 2025 at FACT.
