“I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe”
Jacquie Meng
7 Aug → 8 Sept 2026
Window
Opening celebration, 7 Aug, 7 – 9 am
Clocks are an omnipresent technological force of time.
Another impactful time-telling mechanism is the body.
I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe is a new project by artist Jacquie Meng in the West Space Window.
I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe explores time and the body in a manner that weaves reality and fiction through one another.
Within the Window, a body is formed from a fan, a head from a sunset, hair from an ultrasound, i-Ching hexagrams from a dart board, a foot from a big toe, while the chiming of bells resonates at a random once each day.
Meng's assembled body is an exploration of alternate temporalities and embodiment through the lens of play and the grotesque. At the essence of play is a destabilising of known concepts and structures. The work nods to delusion and fantasy, ways of believing that allow for a sense of plasticity.
As Meng explains,
"Parts of this installation visually reference an embodied or technologically established way of time telling: pregnancy, hair, oracle, foot reflexology, and sun cycles.
The imagery is zany: long eyelashes and pouting faces on fetuses, a disproportionate big toe, a smirking smile in a sunset. Zaniness is not reduced just to fun; it carries undertones of bodies performing in excess, blurring lines between the ludicrous and pain.
Everything here is almost excessively playful, high stimulus, and hyperactive. The assemblage of these parts forming a body is clumsy and precarious. Like time."
Opening Celebration
Friday 7 August, 5 → 7pm
Join us on the balcony for the opening of I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe, while our artist night takes place at Hope St Radio, directly downstairs from West Space.
This month we are hosting DJ Miki, whose sets embody cheeky, playful and deeply considered moodboards of the music she loves, encouraging a reimagining of the way particular genres and sounds might come together.
Jacquie Meng works with painting, sculpture, drawing and installation to create surreal, charged works that use symbolic objects to examine lived experiences in feminity and cultural identity formation. Meng's work reframes traditional cultural prices through the lens of gender and cross cultural politics; mirrors become portals, pool balls transform into eyes and everyday items carry cultural memory, with each playful yet deliberate placement contributing to a deeper mapping of self, place and transformation.