HEAVY ELEMENT
DUO SHOW
Meri Hallenberg & Laura Lowe
Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki
3 – 26 March 2023
LAURA LOWE and Meri Hallenberg's duo exhibition Heavy Element is based on the artists' 2-month research in Japan during the summer of 2022. The trip was funded by the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation and the G.J. Ramstedt Fund of the Finnish-Japanese Association. Many thanks to the Japan-Finland Association in Tokyo for sponsoring our special travel visas during the pandemic.
LET THE FLESH IN STRUCT THE MIND
― ANNE RICE, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
The Mass Paintings explore themes of metamorphosis and changes happening in our environment. The paintings respond to the angel 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 natural ly 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.
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 natural ly 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.
