It may prove a mere accident that we met, or it may prove a necessity, responds to an image of a staged trade fair interior (c.1969) designed by the artist’s grandfather, Clive Entwistle, and features a still life of objects.
Two folkloric symbols of the Harvest Moon and the Tarnhelm are represented by the repeated geometry of the circle, semi-circle and sphere. Both devices appear in hand written notes within the archive. The Tarnhelm, from Nordic myth, is a cap of invisibility that gives its wearer the power to shift in form and move through time, allowing both transformation and deception. In opposition to this, the Harvest Moon offers witnesses total illumination and exposure and hence a moment of reckoning. For Entwistle, these motifs together suggest a spatial and temporal liminality and the uneasy relationship between transformation and distortion.
The central work of the exhibition, a large handwoven tapestry made in collaboration with Moroccan weaver Kebira Aglou, was developed out of an ongoing exchange of source material between the two women. Here, the act of weaving becomes a performative dialogue with the archive, as the artist and then the weaver interprets and translates the imagery, further abstracting it from the original. The tapestry comes to act as a backdrop and frame for a collection of seemingly quotidian objects, all sharing tonal and formal kinship with designs from her grandfather’s oeuvre.
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