The exhibition, You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, borrows its title from a love letter written in the mid 1960’s by Sarah Entwistle’s grandfather and fellow architect, Clive Entwistle (1916-1976), a contemporary of Costantino Nivola.
For the artist, a daily ‘remembering’ has been the practice of calibrating time and place through the collection of discarded objects and material fragments. In recent years this ritual has started to glitch into the historicity of her grandfather’s archive around which her work orientates. Approaching its contents as mutable allows the artist to continually revise and reconstruct new narrative lines. Objects are exchanged into it, and pieces extracted out. In this often-confronting process of merging biographies Entwistle feels a continual tussle for proprietorship as the boundary of a lived history being ruptured.
For this exhibition at Museo Nivola, the artist creates a large-scale sculptural arrangement of objects that record the movement of a year, and her first visit to Orani. Presenting an aggregation of objects that have formal associations with a ‘historical-present’, she draws arcs and tangents between the works of Nivola, the artist’s grandfather (both European emigrants to New York) and her own life and practice.
Many of the elements displayed where gathered on her first over-land travel to Orani from her home in Berlin. Further pieces have been accumulated in the year since from London, Berlin, Morocco, Athens and Sicily. Found and hand-made elements that collectively create an archeology of shapes, materials, tones and textures.
Arranged in the gallery, three monolithic stone and marble plinths display these constellations of artefacts, positioned to form resonant arcs and axis. Stacked around the gallery periphery, large compressed blocks of raw wool in various dyed hues can be laid on by visitors; from there, a series of suspended paper hangings can be viewed. The collaged hangings use differing textures, opacities, paper weights and sizes to create an abstract tonal enclosure of sepia and blues.
A series of three hand-woven panels produced by local Sarule weavers; Lucia Todde, Rosaria Ladu, Pasquala Piredda are allocated to each table arrangement. The weavings are a further illustration of the artist’s continued fascination with the process of translation and interpretation from the drawn medium to a handmade physical object, where slippages in form, scale and colour occur. The intention with this collaborative production is for the composition and outcome to be determined and translated through the eye and expertise of the weavers, and in this less deterministic process new views emerge. Through this body of work Entwistle is searching for a line of sight that synchronizes personal histories, geographical regions and shared material practices.
