Sarah Entwistle: You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again

Museo Nivola presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy of Sarah Entwistle, comprising of an entirely new body of work that includes tapestries, objects, and 2D works. The exhibition, You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, borrows its title from a love letter written in the mid-1960s by Sarah Entwistle’s grandfather and fellow architect, Clive Entwistle, a contemporary of Costantino Nivola.

For the artist, a daily “remembering” has been the practice of calibrating time and place by collecting discarded objects and material fragments. In recent years this ritual has started to glitch into the historicity of her grandfather’s archive around which her work orientates. Approaching its contents as mutable allows the artist to revise and reconstruct new narrative lines. Objects are exchanged into it, and pieces are extracted out. In this often-confronting process of merging biographies, Entwistle feels a continual tussle for proprietorship as the boundary of a lived history being ruptured.

For this exhibition at Museo Nivola, the artist creates a large-scale sculptural arrangement of objects that record the movement of a year and her first visit to Orani. Presenting an aggregation of objects with formal associations with a “historical-present,” she draws arcs and tangents between Nivola's works, the artist’s grandfather, and her own life and practice.

Many of the elements displayed were gathered on her first over-land travel to Orani from her home in Berlin. Further pieces have been accumulated from London, Berlin, Morocco, Athens, and Sicily. Found and hand-made elements that create an archeology of shapes, materials, and textures.

Arranged in the gallery, three monolithic stone and marble plinths display these artifacts' constellations, positioned to form resonant arcs and axis. Stacked around the gallery periphery, large compressed blocks of raw wool in various dyed hues can be laid on by visitors; from there, a series of suspended paper hangings can be viewed. The collaged hangings use differing textures, opacities, paperweights, and sizes to create an abstract tonal enclosure of sepia and blues.

A series of three hand-woven panels produced by local Sarule weavers are allocated to each table arrangement. The weavings further illustrate the artist’s continued fascination with the process of translation and interpretation from the drawn medium to a handmade object, where slippages in form, scale, and color occur. This collaborative production intends for the composition and outcome to be determined and translated through the weavers' eye and expertise. In this less deterministic process, new views emerge. Through this body of work, Entwistle is searching for a line of sight that synchronizes personal histories, geographical regions, and shared material practices.

Sarah Entwistle originally trained as an architect at The Bartlett, UCL, and Architectural Association, London. She is the 2014 recipient of the Le Corbusier Foundation Grant for Visual Artists and in 2015 presented a solo exhibition at the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris. The exhibition coincided with the publication of her experimental biography, Please send this book to my mother, Sternberg Press, 2015. She was the recipient of the Graham Foundation for the advanced studies in fine art, Chicago, 2014; the Artists’ International Development Fund, Arts Council England, 2017; and Main Prize winner for the Mostyn Open 21, MOSTYN.

Museo Nivola in Orani (Nuoro), located in the middle of a park in the heart of Sardinia, is devoted to the work of Costantino Nivola (Orani, 1911–East Hampton, 1988), an important figure in the international movement for the "synthesis of the arts" (the integration of the visual arts and architecture) who also played a key role in the cultural exchange between Italy and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. The museum has a permanent collection comprising more than 200 sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Nivola and organizes temporary exhibitions focused primarily on the relationship between art, architecture, and landscape.