In Sophie Tottie's exhibition AiWHEtL Past time is materialized in the present through recycling.

Residues such as paint residues and brush wash are incorporated and reused in new works and in reworkings of previous works and textual material.

Based on rules that stipulate the repetition of lines, visual and spatial shifts, or specific color recipes, the works depict intersections amidst shifting thought structures.

With painting, drawing, objects and video, the exhibition AiWHEtL revolves around doing and thinking as a process of understanding where the result cannot fundamentally be owned but remains something constantly changing.

AiWHEtL is an acronym for the English “As if We Had Everything to Learn.”* The work is based on a learning where the question is not what it is about but how it works. For example, the relationship between doing and thinking in the light of recycling and reconsideration of what has been done and said. The ink paintings Sense (Universal(s)) begin as much in brush washes as in more abstract environmental studies. Various parts of the working process such as news reports, literature, music and thoughts about making abstractions accessible have been ground down to image and ink. Form and ink production from scratch does not only involve fabrication but also focuses on how both ink and image continue to transform, the ink when exposed to air and takes shape on paper and lines and circles when they open up new paths of association.

AiWHEtL assumes that the world is inevitably changing, while we humans search for patterns and regularities. The video film Law Text Song (2021) and the drawings Möbius Mesh (2017) consist, for example, of materials where regulations such as grammar and legal text are transformed in the encounter with image and sound. Together, the elements in the various works presented form a foundation where everything from more intangible associations (such as how circles connect to planets and cycles) to concrete images (of documentary photos, printed text, contour images) and physical materials (canvas, paper, paint, metal, wood, etc.) build new constellations of meaning.

The work involves a kind of multiple perspective, where different sources and methods show that what leads to the "here and now" that people experience today is not a conglomerate of facts and an end point, but something that is transformed not only in actions but also with ongoing observation, media reporting, changed thought patterns, rewritten history, conditions and dreams.

Paintings and drawings such as White Lines (wubg.tds), Single Fare / Face Value and Alltet, das All, the All attempt to make conscious their own process of becoming by incorporating the unplanned images and marks that arise from the mixing of colors and the use of tools. The works thus function as a kind of prism that weighs in, measures and materializes what may seem to belong to an inner, intangible reality with an outer, more material, physical existence.

* From the text: Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time by Cornelia H. Butler, published in the catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014.