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Sheen, 2022
Gold plated silver and bronze, aluminium, drill core sample from Onkalo, silk fabric
Starry nights above the Earth’s dried-up skin A stylised star fell and its fragments came together and formed a chain It turned into a chain of islands The islands were carved into a piece of driftwood and became a map The map travelled and turned into the body of a silk worm The worms spun protein fibres and hid themselves inside their cocoons Silk was given in exchange for throbbing bodies and lives The silk moth’s feeble wings became separated from its body and turned into a hexagon The hexagon turned into one of the snowflakes that Nakaya drew The crystalline snowflake turned into a star – a beacon in the sky Actually, this sequence can be reversed.
Sheen is a site-sensitive installation, and holds an enigmatic situation, or a poetic possibility. Its basic formality of this work corresponds with the gallery space, and it creates an undefined temple or undefined sacred space around the tall window at the Kuvanveistosalli in Taidehalli. This work creates an altar-like setting in relation to the architectural space: the central axis given by the circle marks on the floor and the 9m tall window, running through the center of the gallery hall. This work embodies a spatial, as well as, contextual composition, with a set of objects: large silk fabrics, gold-plated cast objects (in the abstract shapes of stars–originated from the ornamentations of Taidehalli, snowflakes based on a Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya’s drawing, a tactile map inspired by the famous Ammassalik wooden maps from the late 19th century of Greenland, and silk worm, silk moth and silk worm), unearthed rounded stones from Sondby (ice age’s sandy area), Finland, and drill-core stone samples from Onkalo (the world first underground depository for the spent nuclear fuels built in Finland). Sheen was composed with similar elements and extended its context from my previous work Kalpa | Bedrock | Fibroin (2020) and Unbroken (2021), in both, the drill core sample implies the body of an enormous mass of stone, and the silk fabrics suggest the magical scarves worn by celestial goddesses – the metaphorical narrativity of Kalpa allows us to imagine the scale of planetary time by suggesting the extreme slow speed of a gigantic stone being worn down by the scarf ’s triennially or quadrennially touches.
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