Presented across three subterranean spaces at E-WERK, Freiburg. The underground architecture frames three interwoven installations, combining salvaged fragments, ceramic forms, textiles, photographic and archival matter, and ambient sound into provisional assemblages.
The title references correspondence from Entwistle’s great-grandmother, photographer Viviane Entwistle, to her grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle, as she details the infiltration of rain water, rising damp and water leakages into her domestic space. Central to the exhibition is Entwistle’s engagement with porous boundaries of authorship and biography, and the entanglement of narrative and material histories. As with her long-standing collaboration with the “matter-beings” of her grandfather’s archive, her work explores Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic assemblages,” where humans, objects, and environments co-constitute one another. Resonating with Jane Bennett’s “thing-power,” materials, objects, and spaces co-author the work, opening it onto a more-than-human field of relation.
Entwistle’s sculptural approach follows a line of least resistance: metal salvage finds precarious arrangements, ceramic pipes slump, and velvet curtains pool under their own weight. Improvisation and “making-do” privilege slow accrual and attentiveness over polished completion. Many elements— layered masses of used sheets of roofing tar, stacks of worn linoleum, discarded velvet curtains—are salvaged from waste sites or the surrounding streets of her neighbourhood, carrying “traces of life, labour, and ritual” (Lucy Lippard). Guided by feminist materialist frameworks, Entwistle revalues these discarded materials as animate agents, foregrounding their vitality and embedded histories.
On entering the exhibition, used archival Pantone transfer sheets are seen pinned to the walls. Seemingly peripheral, they act as central collaborators: the color palette and abstract compositions provide a framework through which Entwistle has collected and arranged salvaged materials, shaping the chromatic and textural qualities of the assemblages. This process continues in archival color slides, projected into the dark recesses of the central space. The celluloid cut, layered, and masked to remove figuration and collapse spatial depth, emphasizing abstracted planes of color, gradation, tone, and texture.
In this central chamber, together with the projections and sculptural assemblages an amplified sound layer, devised in collaboration with……..intensifies this atmospheric field. A series of bass woofers mechanically vibrate lengths of in situ metal pipes that stretch across the ceiling, expanding the building’s own bodily registers into audible presence. The low-frequency resonances recall the subterranean infrastructure of the site itself—historically crossed by a sewage channel, where the movement of water once cooled the power plant. These reverberations bring latent circulations of water into the present, extending Entwistle’s interest in the porous intermingling of material narrative, and architectural bodies. The collaborative soundscape continues into the third space with an “auto-compose” process, clarinet fragments and silences loop across ten suspended speakers, with pauses functioning as active, relational forces. Breath, blow, and pause fill and empty the space, mirroring the material environment.
Throughout the exhibition light fittings are dropped to floor level, drawing the gaze downwards, inverting display hierarchies and collapsing domestic functionality. Echoing the title’s evocation of roof failure and water’s gravitational pull, soft pools of light encourage contemplative engagement.
Weep Holes situates bodies, materials, sound, and place as dynamic companion matter, modeling a collaborative, processual, and interdependent sculptural landscape—in which meaning emerges through relational processes.
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