tervetuloa, cloudtopians
this week’s newsletter features many images, so please note that you will need to view it in browser or via the app to read to the end <3
On easter sunday, I woke up early to sit by the frozen baltic seafront in Helsinki’s Market Square. I watched ferries and seabirds glide across the icy water from a tiny table adorned in Marimekko printed tablecloth, sipped coffee from a Marimekko mug, ate korvapuusti(a traditional cinnamon bun!) from a Marimekko plate.
During my weekend in Helsinki, I walked a lot — along the sea’s edge and up cathedral staircases, wandered through neighbourhoods populated by beautiful art nouveau and jugendstil architecture and along the tree lined Esplanadi.
I also spent a good part of my time exploring the city’s museums, including the Helsinki Art Museum, affectionately branded “HAM”.
I’ve wanted to write more about art and museums here for a long time, but I find it daunting to try to condense everything I want to say about the museums I’ve visited into a piece, which unfortunately results in me writing nothing at all. This week’s newsletter is a new attempt to overcome the need to say big great artful things about art by saying small and simple things instead. Art is always worth talking about.
Bambi Forever!
One of the exhibits currently on view at HAM is “Bambi Forever!”, a collection which borrows its name from the title of a painting shown within it(below). The name Bambi references the baby deer from the Disney film (and the earlier 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods upon which it was based); adorable and tragic, the fawn is dually symbolic of a sense of childhood innocence and the pain that comes with growing up and experiencing the world.
The titular painting featured in the exhibit is by Katja Tukiainen, whose ‘Bambi’ is simple yet distorted and strangely doubled despite its simplistic outline. The deer is painted in pinks and pastel colours, a colour palette which reappears in other works of hers like “Pieni Nainen !”(“Small Woman !”), a figure whose intense stare reminded me of the work of painters like Margaret Keane or Yoshitomo Nara, while her tiny body recalls the silhouette of troll dolls and children’s toys. Through her doll like proportions, the title, and the ambiguity of her expression, she is figured as both a grown woman and a young girl.
“Bambi Forever!”, represents a strangeness and a disconnect in our experiences of form, identity, and the passage of time. As the exhibition text describes, “the featured artworks are painterly and expressive, conveying sadness and melancholy, but also hope and humour… the exhibition reflects on the complexities and contradictions of what it means to be human.”
The exhibition features the work of Finnish artists spanning the past three decades, and is full of pastel colour palettes, playful movement, and simple silhouettes, images and meanings are doubled and contradicted, imbuing the collection with a sense of nostalgic youthfulness while maintaining its forward looking gaze and sense of development that makes its works reflective and relatable.
A collection of abstract paintings in soft pinks by Riitta Åkerstedt are expressive, full of uncertainty and quiet emotion. “Paletti ja napit”(“Palette and Tablets”) is innovatively composed, with paint applied in overlapping layers on both sides of a plexiglass surface. “Untitled”(2005) is abstract as well, but its dark background against which smaller areas of lighter colour are highlighted, suggestive of a figure and an atmosphere of loneliness.
Displayed nearby, a bright blue sculpture takes on the motif of the classical Madonna and child. The title “Madonna”1 centres the figure of the mother, whose body also constitutes the major part of the piece, but her head is incomplete, as if the carving is unfinished, or is an ancient work worn away by time; the child in her arms, the young half of the mother-and-child duo, is the only part of the sculpture carved in complete detail.
Other images depict the everyday through energetic visuals, such as in “Sarjasta Kultakutri”(“From the Series Goldilocks”) by Tiina Heiska, which shows a pair of legs in hot pink stockings and dazzling silver shoes, painted in oil in a style that mimics a photograph blurred by motion. “Divan” juxtaposes a figure relaxing, shoes kicked to the side, with heavy ink and abstract shapes.
“Today” by Mauri Kuitula is a large abstract work that speaks to the ennui of adult life, with imagery like the tilted house at the centre of the image creating a sense of collapse and out-of-placeness, emphasised by the added text:
“I’M SAD BUT I’M NOT LONELY”
We see the Bambi motif recur in two paintings by Johanna Kiivaskoski, which take a more romantic approach that is almost reminiscent of storybook illustrations. Here, the figure of the young deer is transformed and recontextualised .
We grow up, we change, the world changes. But these works remind us of what remains, of our inner children and past lives not quite left behind, but ever present. We are still here, forever, Bambi.
Tove Jansson
Another of my favourite parts of the museum’s collection was its exhibition on the artist and author Tove Jansson, best known for being the creator of the Moomins.
Jansson’s body of work is really impressive, encompassing not just the illustrations, books, comics, etc. of Moominvalley, but a number of other illustration projects(such as an edition of The Lord of the Rings), paintings and murals, novels and other writings(my favourite is The Summer Book, a novel about a young child and her grandmother spending a summer together on a remote Finnish island), and much more.
Highlighted in the collection at the HAM are murals commissioned for Helsinki public buildings, including the Helsinki City Hall and the city’s children’s hospital.
This exhibition provides really interesting context on Jansson’s career and impressive creative output by focussing on her involvement in creating public art for the city of Helsinki, which really demonstrates her place and reputation in the contemporary culture, even as her legacy remains firmly planted in the Finnish art world and internationally through the ongoing success of her characters.
I have been a devotee of the Moomins for years, and I must admit that I am not immune to the propaganda of the Moomin Industrial Complex2 that has developed. Over the past few years I’ve amassed a collection of Moomin books and other trinkets, and I returned home from Helsinki with an absurd amount of Moomin merch. However, with their rising popularity, there is definitely a sense of decontextualisation that comes with the ubiquity of the characters and iconography. It’s meaningful, I think, to recognise that these are more than just characters on keychains and shirts, but that they are the creative expression of a culturally significant artist and storyteller, and are only one part of her expansive portfolio. I really admire Tove Jansson’s work and it was wonderful to see her art being highlighted in a space like this, and to see that her work can still be found in spaces across Helsinki(and beyond). Tove forever.
As I finish writing this, I’m drinking coffee out of my Moomin mug, and I have a little stack on my desk of some of the treats and ephemera of my trip: museum pamphlets and maps, an inexplicably Dracula-themed packet of salted liquorice(a taste which I have… not yet acquired), a box of cardemom and blueberry flavoured, oreo style sandwich cookies(obsessed), etc.
Recently…
I finally finished reading Crime & Punishment this week(brag), and have lately been trying to read some more classics and cult classic novels(more on that in a future newsletter!). With the end of the easter season comes the end of a recent obsession of mine, french toast made with hot cross buns - the flavours and soft texture go so well with the cinnamony batter, and they are wonderful drenched in maple syrup with toasted almonds, fruit, or extra cinammon on top. A few other things I’ve been thinking about this week:
This bizarre piece from Brett Martin on a guy whose songs you might have encountered at some point: “Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?”
A fascinating essay on cryptozoology: “Desperately Seeking Mothman” by Tara Isabella Burton
Plus, the real life discovery made by California cryptid hunters: “Bigfoot Hunters Find Something Unexpected In Del Norte County” by Chris Clarke, a story I recently heard about on the American Hysteria podcast’s episode “Bigfoot’s Big Adventure with Author John O’Connor”.
A phenomenal new exhibition of art, “Kandaka” by Safa Abulekilik! If you are Dublin based, you can see the work at A4 Sounds until 14th April, or see the exhibition broadcast online between the 8th and the 14th.
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moominously,
isobel
A few of the pieces mentioned here I only list by title - unfortunately I realised when revisiting my notes and pictures that I had incomplete information about a few of the works in the gallery, and no way to get the missing information at the moment. Sorry! If you know anything about these works please get in touch!
I like Claire Marie Healey’s piece on this moomin-omenon in Dirt, “Moomin Boom”.
“It’s not the same thing at all just looking at them,” says Sniff, perusing treasures in the book Comet in Moominland. “I want to touch them and know that they’re mine.” He’s right—of course, if we love something, we want to hold it…