Installation “My Mind’s Eye and Thickening Skin” is ready after 5 months of hard work. The work, measuring 30m2, is a part of grand exhibition IHMEMAA X in Kerava, Finland. The demolition art exhibition, biggest of its kind in Finland, is realised in an old department store property measuring approx. 3900m2.
The work deals with emotional loss, loneliness and the fear of losing oneself, and consists of mixed-media sculpture, 2 beds, 3 screens from which one is broken and a dead bird. The soundscape of the installation is created by a British performer, composer and artist Alwynne Pritchard
Purkutaide (“Demolition art”) has implemented 10 different art and cultural events in
properties awaiting demolition since 2016. During the Covid-19 summers of 2020 & 2021,
a total of 50,000 visitors came to experience the latest art exhibition, “The Home of Art”, in
an empty apartment building in Keravala. “Ihmemaa X” (Wonderland X) exhibition will
operate in barrier-free premises of several thousand square meters, along with better
transport connections than before and so the expectation is to reach a significant
audience.
Accompanying text:
“Heidi Seppälä left Finland at the age of 17 in search of the experience of freedom, the illusion of which echoes throughout Europe in each of her works. With ambition as her guide, she has spent almost twenty years changing country, landscape and challenge from one project to the next, seeking the deepest potential of art by drawing on different cultural environments.
We both escaped our own histories in order to work, to make art. Antti’s manic search for truth in the recesses of his mind, in the workshop and in the literary classics, and Heidi’s compulsive need to explore the ways in which people and cultures get along and love, both culminate in delusional periods of mental exhaustion and a thirst for freedom.
We collided at the start of our careers in 2006. We went our separate ways, only to return together eighteen years later, enriched by life. Antti had traded his angle grinder for late morning coffee in the company of sparrows, Heidi was practising silence on long meditation retreats. We stayed in each other’s shelter, a place where the ghosts of the past can be greeted in safety. “
