“I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe”
Jacquie Meng
7 Aug → 8 Sept 2026
Window

Close-up of a mixed media sculpture. At the top, there is hair hanging with a braid at the bottom. At the bottom, there is a sculpture of a foot with miscellaneous paintings.
Jacquie Meng, 'I’ve got bells ringing in my big toe', 2026, installation detail, West Space Window. Photography by Janelle Low.
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.

The artist'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.

DJ Miki's 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.

A surrealist uncanny painting of a persons face with long black hair. The painting ends and the artwork continues downwards in the form of a wig with half of it out and half of it in a long braid.
Close-up of a mixed media sculpture. At the top, there is hair hanging with a braid at the bottom. At the bottom, there is a sculpture of a foot with miscellaneous paintings.
Close-up of the big toe of Jacquie Mengs foot sculpture as part of 'I've got bells ringing in my big toe'. A silver bell has been painted like nail polish over the big toe nail.
Close-up of Jacquie Mengs foot sculpture painted with a circus stage scene with a figure on their hands and knees wearing shoes on their hands and another smaller figure standing on the head of that figure with one leg extended and their foot enlarged.
Close-up of a foot sculpture painted with mini faces as the toe nails and a bigger face on the top of the foot.
Close-up of a black hair wig with a long braid pinned up onto the wall.
Close-up of a rectangular white framed window with an artwork inside that combines an ultrasound with painted imagery.
Install shot of Jacquie Mengs 'I've got bells ringing in my big toe' featuring a collection of surrealist figure paintings mixed with sculptural aspects such as a wig.

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.

Related

Close-up of Jacquie Mengs foot sculpture painted with a circus stage scene with a figure on their hands and knees wearing shoes on their hands and another smaller figure standing on the head of that figure with one leg extended and their foot enlarged.

Claire Grant, I can hear bells ringing in my big toe