MELTS

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

“The peace of a world silenced by snow is shattered. The drops begin to fall. Magic winter, I weep.”

The exhibition MELTS / MELTS follows the trail of snow through the landscapes of grief. When the world is no longer what it used to be. I examine the imagery of grief in the context of climate change.

I am interested in weeping as a traditional women’s communal rite of passage through life’s changes. I reflect on the tradition of weeping and the Karelian “weeping grandmothers”. That is where my ancestors are. Could they be a little support for us now and in the new future?

The installation “Weeping Nature” is a winter wonderland, my visual version of a weeping song.

The works in the exhibition are woodcuts, stone lithographs and installed graphics. The process of making and the materials of wood, stone and watercolour paper are at the heart of my work. I make use of the seriality, transformative repetition and collage characteristic of printed art. The white translucency of the paper and the folds and creases that I allow and embrace give their own meanings, references and clues. By combining the different expressions of colour woodcut and black and white lithography, I seek a dialogue between human emotion and reality.

I remember the snow valleys of my childhood. I am fascinated by the magical whiteness of snow and its effect on landscape forms. Snow softens and silences the landscape. I think of winter as a frozen time when nature is present but absent. Humanity’s response to the signs of nature could be compared to hibernation, to hibernation. In my work, crying is compared to the signs of nature, but at the same time crying is a human emotional reaction. I build a dialogue between the inanimate and the animate, the universal and the individual, the state of being and the emotion.

Human sorrows, even collective ones, are minuscule on a planetary scale. From the individual perspective, however, personal feelings and local concerns outweigh and obscure global concerns. The scale of grief is relative and mutable. In my work, the transformation of inanimate nature, which is unimaginable in scale, is concretised in a human expression of emotion that touches everyone: weeping.

I strive to bring a subject of immense scale intimately close.