WHAT IS THIS LIGHT – Maritta Nurmi

One day, I leaned against a pine tree. In that moment, energy flowed into me from a woodpecker tapping the tree’s top. The woodpecker kept going, and energy flowed from the tree into the woodpecker. These paintings are like that tree vibrating in the flow of energy. In these images, the papang are the icons of Karelia and Russia, the supernatural light of the icons, “the wind that carries the bells’ sound from the invisible lakes of Lake Ladoga” (Anna Akhmatova, 1945). They hold Hanoi’s sticky rice and sticky rice universes, and there is sorrow like the moment my hand detached from the tree. The same as the vanishing magical connection to pollinators, the Cat Ba langur (the Hanuman monkey), the wolf, or the leopard.

I lived in Hanoi for 25 years and still spend half the year there. The pierced metal discs are kitchen tools bought from the street, used for preparing sticky rice (sticky rice = Xoi in Vietnamese = rice where the grains stick together). Last year, I studied icons in my mother’s homeland in Karelia; at the Konevets Monastery, in Viipuri, and in Saint Petersburg. The exhibition contains something of these two worlds, martyrs of the disappearing animal kingdom.

What is this light is a quote from Pentti Saaritsa’s poem Runous (1973).
Laitila, August 2019
Maritta Nurmi

Translated with ChatGPT