LAURA LOWE

HEAVY ELEMENT

Duo exhibition with Meri Hallenberg
Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki
3 – 26 March 2023

Welcome to the opening on Thurday 2 March 2023 6 – 8 pm.


LAURA LOWE and Meri Hallenberg's duo exhibition Heavy Element is based on the artists' 2-month research into landscape interventions in Japan during the summer of 2022.

The Mass Paintings explore themes of metamorphosis and changes happening in our environment. The paintings respond to the angle of light, and escape the canvas surface as insects crawling from the thick growths of mass:

“I chose to work with clay-cellulose impasto to reconnect colour with the material world. I was attracted to it’s self-forming and self-shaping quality — like geology in fast-formation. It naturally desires to form the soft undulating wave surface I was looking for, but its appearance also reminded me vicerally of the corporeal body, a plump caterpillar cocooned in metamorphosis.”

As painting takes on corporeal form  it moves closer to installation and sculpture. It has discards the painted depth illusion and even the dimensions of the canvas. The paintings take place in the observer’s space and dimension. Affecting the observer and their world. Experiencing the landscape up close, not as a window to a view, rather as a real topography. Decay is a tangible reminder of human mortality. Materiality evokes great unease in a painting, it destroys the safety of what we thought to be only an illusion.


Supported by the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation and the Finnish-Japanese Association G.J. Ramstedt Fund.