Your installations stem from a dialogue with the archive of your grandfather, the architect Clive Entwistle. You started filtering and digesting its content, replicating the architectural expedient of “spolia”, i.e. when you repurpose older elements in a new building. I’d like to ask you what is the nature of this exchange between his archive and your artistic practice? What are you taking from him and what are you giving to him?

The nature of this exchange is that it’s adapting to many factors that are arising in my context at any moment. For me, the archive becomes a resource that feels in ways infinite, and that I can perceive anew each time I re-enter the material. It has haptic material qualities that I can engage with as reference or as raw material in itself. It also has intentions, ethics, ideologies, and gendered narratives, from which to articulate in relation to. So while this ‘repurposing’ can be explicit when using elements directly from the archive within an installation (such as his erasers) more often I internally metabolise what I extract and when it arises in the work it has already cleaved away from Clive, from the archive and re-emerged as something quite apart from the archive. What do I give to him, I think I try to undo him and release him from his…

The “archive as an offcut of ideas not realized” as you defined it, seems to be spatially translated into a congeries of heteroclitic items, furniture pieces and hand-woven tapestries in your installations. I wonder what are the ideas, unrealized or realized, you are most interested in pursuing?

In terms of ideas, I think the most present Architecturally which one could argue iterates into your values and ways of being in the world… At the current moment, I am interested in fragmentation, abstraction, colour, transparency, opacity, open form,

You quote the conflation of sex and eroticism in your grandfather’s practice, how do they merge and then emerge in your own works?

I think his reflectabed, a panoptical mirrored canopy designed to sit over a double bed, is a fairly explicit merging of sex and design in his practice. of sex as something to witness, preside over, and observe.  I feel this is a theme concurrent with his architectural proposals. The notion of a totalising object that sits outside of somatic experience. It is an approach that privileges the optic sense. I feel I work always in reaction to this notion of sex and the erotic. My process is embodied and open-ended, the fabrication is often highly physical and agile.

I engage what I would define as an erotic charge that I think many makers feel where your bodily intuition attunes with your intellectual mind. I believe Clive also felt this and in that I imagine we merge. This is where I feel a sense of merging and lineage with him.

Can you tell us more about the works exhibited for Temporary Atlas? What do their titles refer to? What’s their composition?

The works for Temporary Atlas were first presented within my exhibition installation, ‘The knots of tender love are firmly tied’, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. Although elements from each have been used in earlier arrangements. Very much in the way I borrow from the archive, there is a certain amount of repurposing happening also within constellations of objects and again with words and titles. The conceptual interchange between the objects and the words gives a wide opening for interpretation and translation and this to me is a very rich layer. ‘I always know when you are lying’, is lifted from a letter written by Clive to his fiancee (later to become his third wife). This sentence can be received in so many ways. We can hear it as a taunt, don’t betray yourself. I also receive a darker tone of masochism and punishment, seeing it as a between masculine and feminine energies which I feel is translated in material and formal qualities within the assemblage. When I stay at the studio they look after the cat, again is an offcut from the archive, this time borrowed from a letter addressed to Clive from his mother, Vivianne Entwistle. Both arrangements are composed from found elements, in particular the metal sheets, and hand fabricated components, such as ceramic objects.

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Seymour Chwast