|
||||||||||||||||||||
Biography
Back to frontpage
Anu TUOMINEN
Born 1961 in Lemi, Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
Anu Tuominen combines the theory of art with beauty found in unexpected places. She does this by collecting and sorting mittens, sugar cubes, or kettle-holders.
"I start from pure theories, geometry and mathematics, I think about structures, forms, but always keep aesthetics in mind. The work must be beautiful, good-looking, in order to open up and function properly."
"Beauty is the important word, although it sounds so light. For me, an ugly object is beautiful, and I think the 'beautiful' things they sell in shops are hideous. I look for small miracles in objects."
Biography
Anu Tuominen studied weaving at the Kouvola Handicraft School in the early 1980s. After graduation, her love of old chairs led her to study upholstering in Teuva in Ostrobothnia. Having studied art for one year at the Joutseno College, she took up studies in interior architecture and furniture design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH. She graduated as MFA in 1992; her graduation exhibition was entitled Kuutio(Cube). By that time, Tuominen was already studying space-time art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, graduating with another Master's degree in 1994. Tuominen has worked as an assistant to other artists, such as Helen Escobedo and Alan Sonfist, both of whom, like Tuominen, have made art from found materials and worked outside the confines of established art institutions. Tuominen participated in Toisin (Otherwise), a children's art exhibition organised at the Finnish National Gallery, with a work entitled
Wunderkammer. In 1995, she won the main prize at the Mänttä Art Festival. In the 1997 exhibition Taiteilijat muuntamossa (Artists in the Transformer Station), Tuominen constructed a researcher's study in the disused building.
Article
Recycled Beauty
Anu Tuominen is a collector, an avid visitor to flea markets, a dumpster diver. She walks on the seashore, searching for tiny treasures. She stores the things she finds in her home until some day they might become art. "Wherever I go, I see interesting details and entities worth studying and thinking about. I notice things that never occurred to me before, whose existence I never suspected. Every day brings me the joy of discovering treasures."
Eggs and Sugar
At the 1995 Mänttä Art Festival, Anu Tuominen won the main prize. The winning work,
Munia ja sokereita (Eggs and Sugar), was exhibited in an apartment building, Mäntylinna, where it filled an entire kitchen. The work consisted of brown and white eggshells and sugar in various forms. The winner was selected by Björn Springfeldt, the director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, who was really ecstatic about the work: "You made my day." The Mänttä tax payers were divided in their opinions, however: the prize money came out of their own pockets and they had difficulty understanding why it was considered art. Sometime later, Tuominen held a small retrospective in the Honkahovi Art Centre in Mänttä, where she showed the doubting Thomases that she was indeed a master of different materials and media.
Eggs and Sugar was an installation made specifically for the space, and after the exhibition it ceased to exist. The purpose of such transient artwork is so they will not become transformed into relics worshipped in museums, they only exist for a certain period of time. Anu Tuominen is not interested in bringing more art objects into the world – she is interested in discovering art in that which already exists.
The Colour Theory of Mrs. Albers
Tuominen's art has been interpreted as reflecting the relationship between modernist, masculine, rational art and femininity. However, Tuominen refuses the title of feminist artist, even though she has knitted coloured squares in the name of Mrs. Albers. Her series Rouva Albersin värisekoituksia (Mrs. Albers' Colour Mixtures) presents the educational colour squares of Joseph Albers, the guru of colour theory, in the form of knitting. Who knows: did Mrs. Albers imitate her husband's coloured oil canvases, or did old Mr. Albers discover his colour theory from his wife's kettle-holders? Who can tell which came first? And why should a square painted in oils be art, but a knitted square mere handiwork?
When you mix blue with yellow, you get green. When you knit blue and yellow together, the combination looks green. Anu Tuominen knitted a garland of leaves with blue and yellow yarn. The name of the work is Lehtivihreää (Chlorophyll).
Tuominen wants to give meaning to things regarded as worthless. She reveals new qualities in familiar, oft-seen things. In formalistic terms, the works might allude to constructivist art, for example, but the works – knitted, crocheted, woven, or stitched on canvas – also awaken memories and feelings associated with the materials. "The real colour circles of round crocheted kettle-holders found in a flea market."
New Kind of Order
Anu Tuominen organises and sorts the objects according to their shape or colour. The theme of her graduation exhibition at the University of Art and Design UIAH was the cube in its various manifestations, while her exhibition Kuvan sijamuotoja (Declining an Image) associated paintings with the fifteen Finnish case endings in an unsuccessful attempt to show all possible visual permutations. Her collection of poems by the same name contained Tuominen's ideas in the form of instructions:
Crochet yellow yarn with white around – a fried egg.
Crochet yellow and white together – an omelette.
Crochet them together into a mass of chain stitches – scrambled egg.
Crochet and undo – whisked egg.
Crochet first one then the other – hard-boiled eggs and butter.
Wind yellow yarn around the white – a boiled egg.
In an exhibition arranged at the Finnish Forest Museum Lusto in 1995, the materials of Tuominen's works were all natural. Burrs, pine needles, rabbit droppings. The artist remarked that it was nice to hold an exhibition in a specialist museum. Her idea was that in such a setting, viewers will look at the works as they are, without trying to decide whether they are art or not. Indeed, Tuominen wants to obliterate the line between art in museums and galleries and the common people and their life. Outside museums, people might forget their preconceptions about contemporary art, allowing art to speak to them.
All of us must have wondered sometimes, where the other sock is, or where the other glove has disappeared. Perhaps there is a heaven for lost socks somewhere. But a lonely mitten that has lost its mate may well find a place in art.
Minna Turtiainen