In my works I study the relationship between man and nature by referring to the Japanese bondage tradition. The Japanese word for bondage, kinbaku-bi, literally means “the beauty of tight binding”. It is a delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of breaking.

At the moment the most important working method for me is that the piece has to control you and not you control the piece, otherwise it becomes an object. It is also important that trough my travels and working I experience my alones and my sense of oneness.

Robert Smithson installed 12-inch-square mirrors to the site in his project “Yucatan Mirror Displacements” 1969. The mirrors reflected and refracted the surrounding environment and gave a new angle to see the landscape. In a similar tradition of Smithson’s use of mirrors, my lines show how shapes of the elements and the connections between them come visible when something alien is added. I’m not only changing their essence, but also my own point of view.

I think that land art is certainly one of the more physical factions of conceptual art. It means real time, real world.

As I wrote earlier, my working is usually very lonely. I travel and spend time alone in remote places and I have started to think that, is this a way of trying to turn your back on the city? If you are turning your back on the city and going to land, landscape, country, are you turning your back on people? I wonder how interested Robert Smithson etc. were interested in people. I think they were interested in individual art doer and in some kind of exchange with nature.

“You have nature when it’s calm and then you have nature when it rages. A lot of people tend to have a Disneyland idea of nature, that it is somehow pastoral, but it isn’t. There are storms and other forces. The closer you get the more you develop this sense that there is a balance between what you would call tampering and the things as they are. But nature has a way of tampering with it’s seemingly solid ground.”

-Robert Smithson

I saw Awoiska van der Molen’s works first time in Photo London 2017 and fell in love with their dark enchanted nature. Awoiska is exhibited here in Paris Phto 2017 by Purdy Hicks gallery. If you are not in Paris, you can visit her webpage.

I think myself more as an land artist than a photographer. First thing that attracted me in land art was the element of danger. You go to see a site like Michael Heizer and you risk your life. Because you have to go there, and if you are not there it could be that you are lost. There is no reference. So you become kind of nomad. And the idea of nomad is very important for me. The idea that you bring your bags on your back, and you go around, you survive, and you find your way of leaving.

Nomad
noun

1.
a member of a people or tribe that has no permanent abode but moves about from place to place, usually seasonally and often following a traditional route or circuit according to the state of the pasturage or food supply.

2.
any wanderer; itinerant.

Greetings from Paris Photo!

Paris Photo is the the world’s largest international art fair dedicated to the photographic medium, will hold its 21st edition November 9th through 12th, 2017 at the historic Grand Palais in Paris.

This is my second year in Paris Photo and I’m here represented by Gallery Taik Persons. Being here and being exhibited next to my heroes means a lot to me. My working process is a little bit lonely sometimes. I travel alone and spend weeks is remote places like in the Finnish Lapland. Being here surrounded by people is a nice opposite to my working. I love how at art fairs you connect with people trough art.

One of the biggest influences to my works has been the art of Jorma Puranen and Ulla Jokisalo, who both I met in an art fair.

Jorma Puranen has become known for his works that arouse considerations spanning the past and the present. In Puranen’s work, the photograph becomes a place for readdressing a fluid past. His photographs are both of the past and the present.

Ulla Jokisalo is a visual artist whose photography-based works are generally collage-like and physical. Her works of art includes photographs, unique paper cutouts, needle punctures and embroidery. Ulla Jokisalo is exhibited during Paris Photo at the Gallery Taik Persons booth.

If you happen to be here, come to say hello!  You can find me at the Gallery Taik Perosons booth C28.