11 November - 27 November 2005
liminal state
The works in this exhibition examine the impressions of time and space through the use of colour comparisons and drawing line. Most of the works are woodcuts but there are some lithographies as well.
In my works I try to give hints to the audience by making allusions to things stored in their memories, like a familiar landscape from the past, or the kind of weather that brings back memories.
The starting points for my art are nature and landscapes, but in the ready works they are present only suggestively. I am more interested in people’s relationships to places than the places themselves. I describe the kinds of layers memories form in connection to important places, like the scenery of childhood etc.
I am interested in the relativity of time and place, in other words the ways in which the meaning of a certain place or memory changes through time. Certain places or sceneries may gradually become almost sacred in our minds. Memories have a tendency to turn into an ideal of the perfect life. We then develop an insatiable yearning to places linked with these memories. The bridging of the gap between everyday life and a dream, and the physical and mental border area between them are interesting themes. What I try to describe is the longing for the unattainable coming together of those two, a liminal state between
Sanna Huttunen
MEMENTO MORI
In Memento mori I study the concept of death and mortality. As a metaphor I use the garden, living plants and decomposed, dead flowers.
Death is both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. In circulation of nature death plays an important role. The garden gives the same experiences concerning beauty and transience as death do.
In my art I have since long studied presence and abcens, and the often changeable border in between. The garden is also a kind of space in between, a border and a crossing, where death and immortality exists in a metaphoric sense. A garden is both a mythic paradise and an ordinary vegetable garden. The garden is full of memories and reminds, smells, sounds, pictures from the past, close people and happenings. It’s a metaphor of human life, which ties together family history, your own identification and value of society. Voltaire uses in his work Candide the garden as symbol for political and personal changes.
Different kind of rituals and rites are connected to death. The same, recurring rituals are our ways of controlling encounter with death. I use repitition in my work, the same iconic marks are used over and over again, in different combinations. My exhibition consists of a collection work, which in different ways brings my theme forth.
Annika Dahlsten