Jonny Briggs: Fitting In

Men’s formal leather dress shoes are the central motif of Fitting In, Jonny Briggs’ solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth. They appear as sculptures in absurdist, animalistic forms with elongated tips bent into bizarre angles, creating playful interventions within the gallery space; as props worn by the artist in a series of monochrome photographs; and as residual marks: bright pink footprints scaling the gallery’s walls. For Briggs, these shoes, in their unaltered form, symbolise a rigid kind of masculinity and gendered expectations that his performative practice critiques and reconfigures.

 

Briggs uses archival family portraits and objects as an entry point into a complex and painful past, which he endeavours to reinterpret through his adult perspective, often by splicing apart frames or inserting his present-day self into photographic prints. While there are no direct portraits of the artist’s father in this show, the varied shoe forms are reimaginings of the type that he wore, and represent for Briggs a feeling of constraint and restriction. When worn by the artist, the sculptures restrict his movement, not only preventing him from moving in a natural way, but dictating that he form a particular shape. In Shoes to form a parallelogram, the artist assumes a hunched pose with his head touching the floor and his feet bent out at awkward angles to accommodate the jutting, angled tips. Elsewhere, Briggs appears caged within a corner while the shoes bend up and around him, creating concentric triangles – a kind of visual maze or trap that recalls the childhood memory of being sent into the ‘naughty corner’. These works, like all the photographic images in the show, appear in thin black frames which echo the black clothing worn by the artist and the shoes. This visual synergy invites us to see the lines that these objects make as different kinds of boundaries or frames, with the figure itself performing as both subject and structure.

 

Violence lingers in these gestures of forced movement and bodily tension, but Briggs’ wearable sculptures are also ridiculous – anti-functional objects with a hint of slapstick. They resemble circus props or surreal creatures, imbued with a childlike joy that mocks social formality and rigid gender roles. This sense of defiance extends through a trail of pink footprints. The ostentatiously bright pink, applied to the soles of the shoes, is at once joyful and confrontational. It evokes the artist’s childhood desire to access a colour coded as feminine – denied to him but freely used by his sisters – and now reclaimed as a symbol of agency and release. Briggs describes pink as ‘a purge, a burst of energy,’ but also ‘a dazzle’ – a visual overload that captivates and disorientates the gaze. In this way, it gestures towards the concept of queer camouflage, a strategy of hiding within plain sight through performative flamboyance.

 

The pink also appears in two photographic works, colouring the artist’s bare toes. Both works appear in triangular cut frames with a strip of neon yellow framing the outer edge, like a warning sign, while a black and white striped backdrop offers another form of dazzle. In Looking Out, multiple images of the artist’s feet form a writhing cluster at the centre, suggestive of movement and intimacy, while in Looking In the toes protrude inwards from each corner of the triangle as if the artist is facing multiple versions of himself. In both cases, the overall image and frame appear fragmented, like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles that have been forced together and feel as if they should fit but don’t quite. 

 

At its core, Fitting In is not simply a confrontation with gender norms or inherited constraint – it is a reclaiming of authorship over one’s own narrative. The title plays on this double bind: the pressure to conform, and the impulse to misfit. Briggs’ work transforms tools of conformity into vessels of absurdity and play, rendering once-authoritative symbols strange, tender, and mutable.