Weep Holes is British artist Sarah Entwistle’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, presented across the subterranean spaces of E-WERK Freiburg. The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of interwoven installations that respond closely to the site’s underground architecture and includes sound collaborations with Domingo Castillo & Moana Holenstein, and Farah Hazim & Susanna Gonzo.
Working across sculpture, installation, and sound, Entwistle brings together salvaged and hand-formed metal, ceramic, textile, archival material, and live ambient sound. Her background in architecture informs a sustained engagement with structure, load, and failure, while her practice resists ideals of control or completion. Metal fragments meet in precarious arrangements, ceramic pipes slump and buckle, and velvet curtains pool under their own weight. Improvisation and “making-do” replace polished resolution, privileging slow accumulation, gesture, and responsiveness to material behaviour.
The exhibition title derives from correspondence between Entwistle’s great-grandmother, photographer Viviane Entwistle, and her grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle, describing persistent damp, leakage, and domestic vulnerability. These letters form both a conceptual and emotional anchor for the exhibition, extending the artist’s long-standing engagement with inherited architectural histories and unrealised projects. Here, domestic maintenance and structural fragility become lenses through which boundaries between interior and exterior, care and collapse, are held open rather than resolved.
Sound extends this logic into an aural register. In the first room a feedback system ampflifies modualtions in movement of the metal elements, soudning the sculptural assemblyand producing a continaully changing tonal rendition of the installation. In another, field recordings from the roof and perimeter of the E-WERK are modified and then amplified through the scupltural elements themselves allowing wind, rain, and atmospheric traces to permeate the exhibition. The building itself is made to sound—to breathe, strain, and resonate.
Throughout Weep Holes, matter is treated not as passive material but as something responsive and alive, shaped through use, pressure, and contact. Drawing on practices of care, maintenance, and embodied knowledge, the exhibition proposes a shared ecology in which bodies, materials, buildings, and other forms of life continually shape one another. Like the architectural device of the weep hole—designed to relieve pressure—the exhibition allows the outside to enter, softening boundaries of containment across human, structural, and more-than-human bodies. Reminisant of materialist and posthumanist frameworks, Entwistle’s practice engages with porous models of authorship and biography, where humans, objects, and environments co-constitute one another.
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