Connections 🖇️ Between conscious and subconscious

Connections 🖇️
Between conscious and subconscious

8.1.2024–31.3.2024

🖊️ Connections 🖇️ Between conscious and subconscious

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Eve Hamari

How would it feel to lay on a juicy ground and press your ears on it? The animal and plant motifs on the fired clay surface are minor odes to the messengers of spring, anemones and worms of the moist soil melted under the snow. The ceramics ‘Ears of the Anemones’ and ‘Anemones and Worms’ were born by exploring the local wild clay on the Kökar island at The Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence. Textiles often reminisce and store memories in a dialogic context. ‘To Sit on a Warm Stump’ with a stunted flower and a rigid stem, a dandelion screaming its yellow, and a dry, warm stump is part of a series of small textile works linking various seasonal memories. To connect with memories regarding other species, abandoned and recycled textile material is a fluent mediator of memories since it often relates to the lived physical life, touch, and care.

 

 

Miska Jounila

The closer one gets to the edge the blurrier and warped the white fields of knowledge become. Only here, at the border of conscious and subconscious, the all-knowing Jester can be met. The Jester is the embodiment of one’s subconscious mind. Nothing can hide from it and it sees all. Jester works in shadows, its decisions and reasoning are beyond the beholder’s understanding. At the edge one can try to grasp the darkness and ask for answers, but they will never be granted. Through its obscure form, Jester laughs until one’s mind is once again pulled away from the edge.

 

 

César Ropponen-Brunel

Gigantic Mass (Masse gigantesque) is part of the Saucer series that explores the effect of painting on the body. The painting connects to the body by its dimensions; the piece is the size of the artist’s head. The subject of the painting is inspired by a floating flying saucer built by the French self-taught artist Jean-Claude Ladrat in 1984. The meeting of the two artists created a connection. Ladrat finally chose one of the paintings from the Saucer series. Giving one piece of work to the artist who inspired the series in the first place completed the meaning of the work and closed the circle of connections.

 

 

Marja Karisalmi

A sleep shield (Unikilpi, 2022) symbolises inner protection or a transitional object between different strata of consciousness. The resulting images reflect consciousnesses that approach, pass or echo from their starting points, the collective ruptures or pain marks that are difficult to define verbally. Our shared consciousness connects to the tensions between control and chaos, based on which the different forms of consciousness perceive their living space as part of the life cycle. This interface above can be described as an incubator (Hautomo, 2023), within which the image carries the image as a tool of shared thinking, repeatedly figuring out its separateness and connection to the other.

 

 

Johanna Lumme

Under The Cover of The Forest (Metsän suojassa) is part of the series Connections, pondering the hidden connections between things in nature. Everything in the landscape exists in respect to each other. The works also describe the eternal cycle of nature, where energy slowly moves from one place to another. The attention focuses on the memories and traces rooted in the forest and the spaces and tensions between things.

 

 

Anu Hakola

The Shades of Blue (Sinen siimeksessä) is a metaphor for the forest growing inside us, the branches reaching out to distant memories and beyond to the unexpected future. Consciousness is one with the surrounding reality; it lives on the branches of trees, growing and bursting into flowers until it is time to fade into a dim hibernation, where only the most distant memories sink. One must walk through the dense forest to notice that something always hides from our understanding, field of vision, and memory. Something unknown remains in the shades where the past and the future come together; the shades have no beginning or end.

 

 

Paavo Stenius

We are living individuals and organisms connected with the environment, collecting information, and passing it on. When painting, the artist gets information with all the senses that combine into a whole on the canvas. The colours, the sounds, the smells; everything affects at the time of painting, making the painting unique both consciously and unconsciously.

 

 

Petriina Kiiskinen

Hair changes as we age and bears signs of different phases of our lives. It deals with the continuum of time and life, genetic memory, and states of being between certain beginnings and endings, creating a boundary between health and illness. Maybe always after the end, there is not a new beginning but a space for a continuation already in progress.

 

 

Taru Tiiliharju

Sweet and Sour daydreams is inspired by picnics, sunlit naps, and summer insects. All of this comes together in the composition, where a slice of mandarin, from which droplets of juice emerge, is adorned with a pink sparkling ribbon. An ant walks on top of the mandarin, and the entire splendour rests on a surface reminiscent of a checkered picnic blanket. The living and lifeless elements combined form a new organism together. The fusion contemplates humanity’s relationship with nature, blurring the lines between our creations and the organic beauty that envelops us.

 

 

doğa çal

Which parts carry the weight, gender and sexuality, or the burden of the day or that of a dream? I separate the fragments with the meanings attached to them. As if with a whistle, all my body parts will come together. The 4’39” long video is composed of four short videos and black blank timelines that allow the viewer to encounter dismembered body parts and enable them to settle somewhere on the broad spectrum from the absurd to the horrific.

 

 

Tommi Lehto

In the silence of the night and the slowly moving time, a sad mind sits when the thoughts are too heavy to sleep. The night progresses as the moon shines, which the worrier overlooks from behind the window. The connection between the worrier and the outside world is broken; there is only a quiet room and a beautiful landscape; maybe beauty promises a better tomorrow as long as you can grasp it.

 

 

Linda Lehtovirta

Change and transition are mental and physical manifestations of nostalgic memories through sensory experiences linked with materiality, like connection through the gaze. ‘Gazing’ is part of a photograph series ‘Forget Me Not’, drawing inspiration from a generational experience and representation of femininity. The themes of millennialism investigate adolescence in a personal mix with pop culture and the familiarity with the unknown – confusion, wonder and encountering new things.

 

 

Anna-Kaisa Haanaho

Handmade, soulful, touchable. The connection between conscious and subconscious lies between the hands of the maker, whose intuition guides towards the outcome. Intuition combines the known and the unknown, the desire to create and the already existing knowledge of the maker’s world.

 

 

Pietu Tamminen

The bridge is a somewhat cliché metaphor as a picture. It is a symbolic image of continuity, taking things over an obstacle and connecting them. Physical and psychological structures are part of the overall picture to expand the train of thought from the image. As an example of the artist’s practice, it helps to find continuity and universal emergence in the visual language.

 

 

Katja Härkki

Desire does not set any power structures in advance because it articulates and strives for connection. Without the other party, there is no desire. A positive experience strengthens the desire to experience it again and affects the experiential consciousness.