Artists
The Soft Power of Lucy Sparrow
The British artist makes her museum debut with a 1980s-inspired supermarket stocked with more than 20,000 felted objects.
Lucy Sparrow’s first U.S. museum exhibition is an all-felt recreation of a 1980s supermarket titled “The Beginning of Convenience.” Its making, however, was anything but convenient. The installation is stocked with more than 20,000 to-scale soft sculptures, painstakingly hand-crafted by the British artist and her team of felters over two years. The only thing convenient about the project? “It’s light!” Sparrow told me at the show’s opening. “The boxes don’t weigh anything.”
It’s hard not to be swept up by the installation, which unfolds across aisles upon aisles at the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas. The felted shelves hold everything from cans of corned beef and chewing gum to frozen pizza and laundry detergent. There are produce bins, a pharmacy, a service counter, checkout stations, and a video rental section with faithfully recreated VHS tapes.
This marks Sparrow’s biggest project yet, the latest milestone in a career built on her own terms. Here, as in her previous pop-ups, you’re struck as much by the craftsmanship behind every object as by the sheer scale and audacity of the undertaking. While her practice has often been framed as a critique of consumer culture, it’s more so a celebration of the mundane, an elevation of the everyday.
“Lucy’s work disarms you,” Laura Pratt, the Momentary’s manager in charge of curatorial affairs, told me. “This is not a food museum. It’s not a reverential space. You feel comfortable enough to have emotional reactions and reflections.”
“Convenience” also pays tribute to Bentonville’s retail legacy, with Sparrow and her team drawing on Walmart’s archives for inspiration. For the artist, the supermarket remains one of the few universal spaces.
It’s a “social leveler,” she said. “Everyone has to eat. It might be an upmarket supermarket or a cheap supermarket. You get your ingredients, go home, and cook your own impression of it. There’s so much to look at in supermarkets that is an absolute art form.”
Behind the Seams
“Convenience” is the latest in a long line of Sparrow’s felt retail worlds, following her pop-up bodegas, vegetable stands, bagel shops, and even a McDonald’s. The through line isn’t accidental: These environments draw directly from the artist’s own life.
Born in 1986 in Bath in the United Kingdom, Sparrow studied art and design at a community college, before attending and then dropping out of university. “I didn’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like to sit around and think about stuff. I like to do things.” She instead carved herself a creative path, supporting herself by working at a convenience store and a supermarket, as an exotic dancer then a receptionist. “It was work to make money to buy art materials,” she said.
That material was most often felt, a no-nonsense textile that belies its versatility. Around age five, Sparrow stitched her first felted work—a red star for her mother’s Christmas tree—and never stopped sewing. By the 2010s, she was creating felted replicas of famous artworks, such as Damien Hirst’s shark and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, which were included in a 2012 show at the Hoxton Gallery in London.
“Felt is so easy to use and carries a lot of memories,” she said. “People underestimate it. They don’t take it seriously as an art material.”
Sparrow indeed struggled to gain traction in the art world. By 2014, after being constantly turned away by galleries, she had grown deeply frustrated. But while on a bus ride from Oxford to London, inspiration struck: Why wait around for the approval of gatekeepers? Why not stage her own show?
“I’m gonna have to come up with something so good that people can’t ignore it,” she decided. “What’s my first job? My first job was at a corner shop. What do I like? I love packaging. I love making stuff. I love making normal stuff look fake. So, I made a corner shop.”
“The Cornershop,” Sparrow’s first felted environment in 2014, was funded with a Kickstarter campaign that raised some £10,000 (more than $13,000). Housed in an abandoned neighborhood convenience store in London, the installation was filled with 4,000 hand-stitched sculptures from felted bags of Doritos to cans of Coca-Cola that were available for sale. It was an instant hit. By its close, Sparrow had thousands of Instagram followers, an assistant, a van, and a business.
“I don’t take no as an answer for a lot of things. I’m all about problem solving—that’s a huge part of being an artist,” she said. “So much of what I’ve done is learning by doing it.”
The Joy of Making
The show at the Momentary marks a departure for Sparrow. Where her pop-ups have been funded by sales from each previous installation, this exhibition affords her the rare luxury of having a work on display for a year, while offering a selection of objects at the museum’s gift shop.
Another gallery at the show recreates Sparrow’s Suffolk studio, which she purchased in 2020, underscoring how far she’s come since her days of working out of her spare bedroom. Dubbed the Felt Cave, it’s where she and her team spend their days surrounded by felt, thread, paint, and cats.
Facing the studio recreation is a wall of stuffed bananas modeled after a plush toy Sparrow received at age nine. The original, which she named Sebastian, is long retired, but the banana has become her mascot, embodying the childlike wonder and nostalgia that define her work.
That sensibility extends to her process. Sparrow still insists on hand-crafting and hand-painting every object in her installations, however ambitious they get. “It’s not about being tidy, perfect, or neat because if it was a replica, I would just print it,” she said.
To her, the real reward isn’t just seeing visitors wander through her installations, but also the act of making. She talks of working while her mind drifts from ideas to songs to imaginary conversations. For all her crowd-pleasing work, a part of Sparrow seems happiest in her Felt Cave.
“My favorite place is just happily doing my thing, giving birth to all these funny little objects,” she said. “It’s addictive. I don’t want to stop. My hand hurts, but I don’t want to stop.”
“Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience” is on view at the Momentary, 507 SE E St, Bentonville, Arkansas, through July 11, 2027.