Duo Kutsunäyttely 2017
The Association of Finnish Sculptors invited me and sculptor Anneli Sipiläinen with a long career to a to Duo-show. We both made our exhibits independently. I constructed two new installations. In the front room where the visitors first entered I had a high structure of an old pier on a sea front. On the surface of the pier I had made a colony of small sea creatures from ceramics. In the windowless back room I had a work entitled ‘The Avalanche’. The work shows layered soil and the uncontrollable movement of masses of soil.
The starting point was a few weeks spent on the southern coast of England in 2016. I felt nature’s own timing, not concerned with people. The tide rose and fell, peculiar sea creatures were lurking in the shallow waters and fossils dotted the stones and pebbles on the shore. At the same time erosion scrubs the soil from the cliffs and from under the plants.
The Pier
The exhibition space called for a high structure. I made the pier from porous wood fibre board with either stained or painted veneer top. I made an imaginative colony of sea creatures on the pier from paper clay and paper porcelain. They a magnified compared to natural ones. My aim was to unite two worlds: one of people and the other of small creatures left unanimous for most people. The small creatures can be seen as glimmers from the times millions of years ago, the man-made structures have trouble lasting for even as long as some tens of years.
Photo 4,5 & 6 Satu Salonen-Karabulut
The Avalanche
The starting point for this work is erosion, which causes the rhythm of the soil, stratified during long periods of time to collapse. The complicated puzzle of the landscape becomes a dangerously moving slide which is difficult to stop. The work is in two parts. One is a cross section of the soil, made of papier maché and natural materials dyed with pigments seen through a glass window. The avalanche is described by a collage of ten crayon drawings spilling onto the floor.
Photo 1, 2, 3 & 6 Satu Salonen-Karabulut