No doubt your mother told you that the ceiling caved in presents a fragmentary sculptural landscape is embedded within a five-channel soundscape. Engaging with the semi-permanent structure of the Kunsthal44 Pavilion not as a passive container but as co-agent in the work’s unfolding. The architecture becomes intrinsically woven into the becoming of the sculptures: ceramic elements and found building cables are suspended from, cradled by, or braced against the structural frame. This interdependence expresses a quiet yet persistent tension—a choreography of weight, counter-balance, and support, privileging negotiation over resolution.
The exhibition proposes a sculptural language rooted in relation: with invited artists - Farah Hazim (b.1990) and Susanna Gonzo (b.1990) - with the material and spatial logic of the Kunsthal44 pavilion, and with the animacy of materials themselves. With this Entwistle deepens her exploration of authorship and collaboration— as a generative force shaping both process and form, in alignment with feminist and posthumanist traditions that centre interdependence—where bodies, materials, and environments are co-constitutive. In this, her sculptural language is tactile, responsive, and porous, modelling a processual approach that values vulnerability, reciprocity, and the dissolution of boundaries between form and context.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from letters exchanged between Entwistle’s great-grandmother, photographer Viviane Entwistle, and her grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle. These letters chronicle the cyclical collapse and repair of domestic interiors—where water seeps through ceilings, leaving mineral traces and corroding certainties. Both homes and bodies are revealed as permeable.This permeability—psychic, structural, and sonic—suffuses the work.
Entwistle resists architecture’s legacy of permanence and mastery, instead adopting a language of improvisation and slippage. Her ceramic pipe forms—evoking drainage systems and biological conduits—are suspended in industrial slings, strapped into the building, or slumped on the floor. They register the soft fatigue of matter: gestures not of monumentality, but of collapse and care. A negotiation plays out between tension and softness, form and collapse. Decomposition emerges as a mode of making, as Entwistle partially disassembles the building’s material envelope to construct her own fragile system of support. The result is a precarious, interlaced architecture—one in which building and sculpture exist in mutual dependence.
The collaborative soundscape, presented through ten exposed speakers and ambient weather sounds of the site is conceived with Farah Hazim (b.1990, Tripoli), Sarah Entwistle (b.1979, London), and Susanna Gonzo (b.1990, Valdagno). The installation unfolds not only in space, but in time and vibration as the interior and exterior sonic field intermingle through the deconstructed window opengings, dissolving the boundary between sculpture and site.
Developed during their residency at the Kunsthal through recorded experimentation with clarinet sounds and silences there is a process of auto-compose—a method allowing raw, accumulated fragments to develop an unfolding structure. Resisting defined compositional outcomes and linear form, the artists created space for randomness as a productive force. Like Entwistle’s sculptural practice, which questions monumentality and fixed form, the sound element resists closure and hierarchy, aligning with a feminist ethos of improvisation, porosity, and open form.
The recording process became an embodied act of listening and response, where instruments—and time itself—are animate collaborators with their own resistances and textures. The speakers emit clarinet droplets with long silences between—trying to hold shape under pressure. Silence is not absence, but waiting: condensation forming, a ceiling preparing to give. Each sonic fragment—breath, blow, or pause—remains partial and relational, leaning toward the tactile and intimate rather than the resolved or coherent. Structure is negotiated rather than imposed; process is as significant as form.
The composition never repeats, looping unevenly across a polymetric web of samples. As if the house exhales, the space fills and empties. Sounds appear like damp spots: some unnoticed, some spreading, some vanishing with the sun. It is a form of divination—a composition of unlikely elements, an assemblage of echoes. Here, sonic and material leakage mirror each other. We hear the structure trying to contain itself—and failing, beautifully.
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