For her solo show Hourless and at large, Emily Wardill presents works from fourteen years ago to the present day – reflecting on connections and dissonances within them and the role that the imaginary plays in our relationship to the material world. Game Keepers without Game (2009) is presented alongside her last film work Night for Day (2020), both of which use the conjecture of family to talk about generational shifts in ideology and the strange two-way membrane between ourselves and the objects modelled in our image. Stretching this influence into the architecture of Casa São Roque, Wardill litters objects around that fluctuate between being props, status symbols, evidence of crime and fictitious remains. Executed specially for this exhibition, a new commission Sleep Patterns and Musical Chairs (2023) takes the imaginary of the nation state – projecting the patterns that car headlights make on our ceiling at night across three of the rooms whilst woozy musical interpretations of anthems bleed in through the walls (played on the piano by Daniel Bernardes). The architecture of Casa São Roque becomes a part of the piece through these accidental moving highlights. A series of relief sculptures Through the Walls (2016) reveal themselves as we walk around the exhibition: A House, Noh Costume, Polar Bear Cub – all taken from the titles of origami pieces. In the series Children or Animals frames don’t respect the boundaries of conventional framing – just as walls can be passed through as though they were digital. I gave my love a cherry that had no stone (2016) was filmed with a drone that was pretending to be human and a human pretending to be a drone. It takes us into the body of the dancer David Marques which has become indistinguishable from a digital body and who moves through space as though he were CGI (computer-generated imagery). The exhibition, like the house itself – sits within histories imagining futures – everything planning an escape route from the time it finds itself in. Everything hourless and at large.

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