Carry this folded piece of paper everywhere, like a talisman
2017
Turin, Italy.
The geometry of double cone and sphere find multiple expression in Clive Entwistle’s extensively varied and largely un-realized architectural and design proposals. The double cone, in esoteric philosophy often conceived as the inter-penetration of the divine and the mundane, sometimes as the female figure, was a ubiquitous geometric feature in mid-twentieth century architecture and design.
In 1973 Clive Entwistle, the artist’s late grandfather, spent a year in Morocco concurrently as the French Moroccan architect Jean Francoise Zevaco (1916-2003), was using the same geometrical configurations as leitmotif and as structural expressionist details. The exhibition will go on to be shown in Zevaco's house in Casablanca In 2018. Moments of synchronicity like this provide a framework for exploring Levi Strauss’s notion of “ bricolage biography”, in which fragments, offcuts, and disparate parts can be meaningfully connected.
To select and put together the disparate parts of this exhibition is to fabricate, in its complete meaning; to construct ,forge and make, but also to invent and fictionalise. Within the exhibition an amalgamation of objects, with deliberately ambiguous functions, provenance and authorship are arranged on two large handwoven carpets. Together with a series of seven large works on paper.
Intended to create formal associations, the arrangements are temporary. Each new iteration produces new configurations and dynamics between the parts - changing both meaning and potential. This infinite shape shifting assign a value beyond a single prescribed use, attesting to the artist’s own fascination with the malleable nature of things and history.
Central to the project is an on going collaboration between the artist and the Moroccan weaver, Kebira Aglou. These large scale weavings act as a staging and container for an array of seemingly quotidian objects, many found and readymades, all sharing tonal and formal kinship with designs from the artist's late grandfathers oeuvre. Similarly the compositions for the weavings are derived from collages produced by the artist using the large collection of off cuts and left over transfer sheets, the residue of the analogue processes used by the artist’s grandfather and found in an old black and white marbled effect A2 portfolio. The sheets, with scalpel marks, rubbings and cutouts, the expression of the architects’s thought processes in motion, resonate with the artist as a wordless communion between herself and her grandfather.
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