Award winner 2003
Anu Tuominen
born 1961 in Lemi, lives in Helsinki
Anu Tuominen graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 1995. She had already completed a degree at the University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH in 1992. Tuominen’s object works have their points of departure in visual ideas and thinking. Her art links together objects, words and images into a single rich jigsaw puzzle of ideas. In her hands, everyday utility objects, metal kitchen utensils, broken crockery or ordinary buttons from flee markets are miraculously transformed into something else, but without losing their original nature. Via small additions, the use of colourful balls of wool and skilful crochet-work, or simply by sorting and combining, realisations of the artist’s ideas in visual form grow organically out of them. A subtle addition brings about an unspoken metamorphosis. The works return to presence the colour of blueberry milk, the sounds of manual work, the chalk-smell of the school classroom, what it tastes like, what it feels like to the touch.
As with conceptual artists, Tuominen uses words, images and objects to bring out connections that are inaccessible to rational thought, and apparently semiotically impossible events that are nevertheless possible in the world of art and poetry. In the book Kuvan sijamuotoja (grammatical cases of the picture) the objects are concretised using purely verbal instructions – there is no need to fabricate these works, since words alone have the capacity to make them visible. In Magritte-esque fashion, the pictures, too, live out, their own visual truth; in Tuominen’s works a burning candle in a postcard really does burn, a picture of a hawk breaks free form a page in an encyclopaedia to ascend onto a hillock made out of the page, and so on. The boundaries between the true and the imagined, the seen and the thought, the said and the manufactured begin to waver. Tuominen’s works open up an exhilarating domain of insights, play and wonder, a world that would be impossible for rational logic, and which eludes explanation. The tangled continuum of the works forms a kind of metaphor for creativity and art that is bound up with a long tradition in art.
Marja Sakari
Exhibitions
Aine Art Museumen taidemuseo, Tornio 22.8.-5.10.
Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki 16.10.-9.11.
Salo Art Museum 22.11.2003-4.1.2004