Porin Saskiat ry, Scholarship Exhibition

Kirsi Jaakkola – Paintings

Kirsi Jaakkola’s paintings focus on her immediate surroundings, such as yards and gardens. A private yard can be a battleground for social approval. The environment, whether naturally growing or controlled, marks its inhabitant in the eyes of others. Her paintings feature fences, boundaries, and plants, bringing to life a rhythm that is both restricted and free. Ultimately, these works deal with the landscape, its valuation, ownership, and construction. The paintings are created using acrylic and oil paints on canvas.

Elina Sillanpää and Jaana Liukkonen – “Wall and Textile”

Jaana Liukkonen and Elina Sillanpää graduated in 2002 with Master’s degrees from the Department of Textile Art at the University of Industrial Arts Helsinki. They share the same professional background, teaching textile printing, and their final projects explore themes of perception, experience, and the analysis of materials and techniques. The result is work that reflects on all these aspects, both individually and collectively.

The exhibition centers around printed fabric and the technique of fabric printing. The goal is to bring attention to the surface and concept of printed fabric, to explore it, tear it apart, and rebuild it anew.

The theme of the exhibition is wall textiles, a concept that allows for personal approaches to seeing and creating.

Elina Sillanpää uses photographic borders in her works, which inspire her to transform them into textile pieces. The image becomes fabric directly or conceptually. The purpose of the printing technique is not to serve as a tool for achieving specific patterns, but she uses the medium freely as it is. In this way, the very existence of the printing technique becomes an end in itself. The fabric’s nature and technique provide the desired form.

Jaana Liukkonen reflects on the invisibility and otherness of fabric in culture. In her works, the presence of textiles is evident through impressions, indentations, and shadows left by fabric that has been present but left its mark. The materials used are non-textile, heavy, rigid, and cold. The fragility of the fabric and the permanence of walls engage in dialogue. The presence can be assertive or simply a faint trace.

This text was created with AI assistance