Arts & Crafts Association of Pori – Anja Karkku-Hohti, Eila Minkkinen

The Arts & Crafts Association of Pori  is organizing an exhibition at Poriginal Gallery, featuring two invited artists: painter Anja Karkku-Hohti from Pori and sculptor Eila Minkkinen from Rauma.

The works in this exhibition observe nature—its essence and its state. Using gouache and copper as their mediums, the artists have explored this theme based on their own inspiration and thought processes.

Anja Karkku-Hohti

In her work, Anja Karkku-Hohti examines details of nature—small-scale environments close to humans. She explores how nature, with which humans are physically and mentally intertwined in countless ways, offers an endless wealth of resources that play a fundamental role in human life, thought, action, and creativity. Nature is both our shared physical and spiritual home, and caring for it is our collective responsibility.

Eila Minkkinen: Evil Rain

In my earlier metal sculptures over the years, I have incorporated many natural forms.
I have attempted to express rain, starry skies, snowy landscapes, sunsets, and various plant themes using a stubbornly rigid material. Sometimes, my themes have advocated for environmental conservation, such as in the work “Which Will Prevail—The Machine or the Tree?”, where a tree-like form is being overrun by a mechanical structure.

The origins of the works in this exhibition trace back to Paris, 1997, when I was a resident artist at Cité Internationale des Arts. Since working with metals was not possible in the studios, I made use of an easel available there. I bought aluminum foil and shaped it into hanging sculptures on the easel and reclining compositions on the floor, then photographed the final results.

A fascinating coincidence occurred during my two-month stay: at that time, a German artist had an exhibition at the Paris City Art Museum, where he had created an entire room-filling installation of aluminum foil woven throughout the space, complemented by colored papers and paintings. This experience encouraged me, upon returning home, to acquire thin copper sheets and begin “sculpting” with them. Between 1999 and 2000, I created wrinkled sculptures under the theme “Thirst”. These pieces have previously only been displayed in my studio and later at my retrospective exhibition at Rauma Art Museum in 2015. Now, they are included in this exhibition.

After receiving an invitation from the Arts & Crafts Association of Pori to exhibit alongside Anja Karkku-Hohti, I returned to working with 0.1 mm-thick copper sheets. I began creating these works in late February, only to soon hear the news of a global pandemic, which was known to have originated from an unsanitary food market. Our entire planet is dangerously polluted, and people are now expected to consume responsibly and take environmental conservation seriously.

The alarming news led my thoughts to environmental pollution and the extinction of plant and animal species. The titles of the exhibition pieces—such as “Evil Rain,” “A Little More Water,” and *”Black Coral”—*reflect these concerns. However, as an optimist, I have also included elements of romanticism, as seen in “Nocturne – The Twilight of a Summer Evening,” and a touch of humor, such as in “There Really Is Water on the Moon.”