Artist Amartey Golding’s chainmail series—which he began in 2015, and spans film, sculpture, and photographs—continues at FACT with Chainmail 4: Silent Knight (2025). This latest piece resembles a large duvet wrapped in a conical shape: pointed at the top, fat at the bottom. Obscure symbols are woven in, akin to graffiti tags or a secret code. Multiple pairs of mannequin legs clothed in tracksuit bottoms and trainers poke out from underneath. It gives the appearance of several people using the quilt as a communal shield.
At FACT, the sculpture stands alone underneath a bright spotlight in an otherwise very dark room. The chainmail glistens like a pile of costume jewellery. The seating—hardwood benches arranged in two blocks of three rows, with back rests that make it difficult to slouch—are reminiscent of church pews and a deliberate choice that is markedly different to the gallery-standard blocks, cubes and beanbags. Lauryn Hill’s ‘Ex Factor’(1998) and Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’(1939) are melded together to provide the installation’s soundscape, played on a loop, at half speed. The overall effect is beautiful, haunting and melancholic all at once.
Chainmail 4 is the product of a two-year collaboration in which Golding worked with incarcerated men and prison guards based at HMP Altcourse, Liverpool. It is exhibited as the conclusion to FACT’s multi-year Resolution project which, since 2018 has invited four artists, imprisoned people and their families, prison staff, policy makers and criminology researchers to work together. The aim of Resolution was to create an opportunity for dialogue between those able to affect the justice system (policy makers, researchers) and those with lived experience of incarceration.
Acknowledging that the British justice system isn’t working for those most intimately affected by it, Resolution asked: what can be done differently? To tackle this question, FACT’s learning team facilitated a series of artist commissions with Melanie Crean, Katrina Palmer, Ain Bailey and Amartey Golding in prisons across Liverpool, Rochdale and York. Each artist used collaborative art as a methodology to explore and later represent experiences of the justice system from the perspectives of those living and working within it.
To date, Golding’s Chainmail series encompasses four works, with each iteration exploring a different aspect of masculinity. The first piece of chainmail was made for his brother, a ballet dancer. The intention was that he would dance in the chainmail garment until a point of collapse. It was made, in part, as a response to Golding’s godson’s experience of witnessing multiple knife attacks. The artwork sought to represent the weight that performing masculinity carries, and the toll this takes.
Chainmails 1-3 had each been conceived for a specific wearer and a public performance. However, in the case of Chainmail 4, activating the garment with a live performance was never an option. The work Golding would make at HMP Altcourse had to speak for his collaborators in the gallery, in their absence. In a talk Golding gave at FACT, he spoke about making the work together with the men, noting that it was the first of the Chainmail pieces to be collaboratively woven. It was a process he jokingly referred to as ‘masculine knitting’. Resembling a loosely knitted fabric, chainmail is constructed by bending and shaping small loops of metal. Hard materials and heavy-handed processes are characterised as masculine, but knitting is associated with women. ‘Masculine knitting’ therefore is a tongue in cheek quip highlighting how we gender certain activities and the act of making chainmail blurred these boundaries.
Furthermore, knitting in community, as Golding was, has connotations of ‘Stitch and Bitch’ groups: social meetings for women to come together to knit and gossip. Men are conditioned to be stoic, strong and silent. Gossiping and sharing stories is, in some corners of the cultural imaginary, the preserve of women. In the context of a male prison, this act of ‘masculine knitting’ opened up a space for participants to talk about their lives and experiences candidly with each other. These conversations were never recorded. Rather, the chainmail serves as a representation of the time the men spent talking. Woven into the chainmail are motifs and initials provided by participants. They represent dreams of freedom, acts of resilience; or simply marks that they were there.
Chainmail 4 was made over a course of workshops facilitated by HMP Altcourse and FACT staff across a two-year period. Participants came and went as custodial sentences ended, new ones began, or people were moved onto different facilities. This may seem like a fragmented process, but Golding notes that the stories the men shared were united by many common threads. For example, he noted that most inmates and guards, if not all, were from lower-socio-economic backgrounds and many were veterans, a demographic that is over-represented in the prison population.
‘Social currents’ was a term Golding used repeatedly throughout his talk to describe the roles we get assigned by accident of birth. The way our society configures class, race, and gender produces uneven access to social goods like education, health, social justice and public safety. A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (2023) evidenced this stark reality, finding that it’s now harder to achieve upward social mobility than at any time in the past fifty years. Speaking openly about his own working-class, mixed heritage background, Golding recounted a youth spent escaping the path that society would have laid out for him. His mum moved him out of London to live with family members in a bid to access better schooling, and avoid the worst of inner city life: gangs, violence and over-policing. For some of the men he worked with, ‘doing time’ felt like respite from the pressures of the world.
As a fabric, chainmail embodies a version of masculinity with all the pretence and hyperbole of the fairytale: the gallant protector, or the knight in shining armour. Chainmail 4 upends these associations by emphasizing the fabric’s defensive properties: chainmail is here is a large duvet, cocooning several people. It poses no danger to the viewers, but rather suggests an external danger that the people inside are shielding themselves from. What do the implied wearers (the imprisoned men) need protecting from? Why might these men feel unsafe? Are they able to access protection? Is access to protection distributed evenly throughout our society? These are the questions Chainmail 4 asks of its audience.
Golding implies that the men of Chainmail 4 have been failed by the social structures and institutions that scaffold our society. This failure or unfairness affects us all; its consequence is loss of time and life. Chainmail 4 asks for compassion and seeks out care. All the fight and bravado of toxic masculinity has dispersed. In its wake are people hiding under a quilt.
Observing this shimmering duvet, on an uncomfortable, stiff-backed bench—which Golding has organised to connotate seating in churches, court rooms, Victorian era schools, and other institutions that reproduce our society’s norms and values—feels deeply sad. Emphasizing this sense of loss and sadness are Vera Lynn’s and Lauryn Hill’s slowed down songs that evoke a sense of time unravelling. As the voices of the female singers fall apart, they become baritone, a quality we normally associate with a male. In this setting, the lyrics of the songs take on new meanings that speak to the burden of performing masculinity:
Let’s say goodbye with a smile, dear
Just for a while dear we must part
Don’t let this parting upset you
I’ll not forget you, sweetheart…
The opening verse of Lynn’s song, becomes the voice of a stoic man bidding farewell to his partner, and holding back his own emotions as he begins his sentence.
Projects like Resolution are underpinned by years of relationship building and cultivating of trust. FACT has been working with three prisons, HMP Altcourse, HMP Buckley Hall and HMP Askham Grange, since 2018 across different projects with different artists: Melanie Crean, Katrina Palmer, Ain Bailey and now Amartey Golding. This long-term relationship has enabled FACT’s learning team to design artist commissions with an understanding of the prison and those who occupy it. These residencies have been carefully managed and are always presented as ‘opt-in’ opportunities for the imprisoned. Resolution makes clear that collaborative art making can be a powerful tool for reimagining personal and collective narratives. Chainmail 4 asks us to reconsider how, what and why we punish. Could we care better instead?
Amartey Golding, FACT, Liverpool, 23 May – 10 Aug 2025.
Nat Hughes is the Merseyside Editor of Corridor8.
This review is supported by FACT Liverpool.
Published 06.08.2025 by Laura Harris in Reviews
1,452 words