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Information bulletin 5 November 2007 FROZEN FLOWERSat Greatmore Studios courtyard, November 2007 |
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This time I came to Cape Town with my old herbarium, inside it tiny Finnish plants I had to collect as a schoolchild decades ago, hands frozen. When you have the long summer, we have the long winter. I wanted to link the impressive Capetonian flora to the nature of my very northern fatherland. Now I have an opportunity to work some time as a "gardener" at the Greatmore Studios courtyard and to cultivate an environmental artwork there. I am like those Europeans who first came here to cultivate plants for sailors, but my plants are not for eating, I suppose. And I am not going to take your land from you. I am going to bring you visual snow with plants and things made white. I am worried about our shared nature which gives us sunshine, wind, rain and also snow. I am worried about the climate warming in some places and coldening in other places, the heavy changes in the world. The plants and flowers also symbolize many other things; everyone has her/his own relationships and meanings to them. So I ask people in and around Greatmore Studios to participate by bringing me plants or flowers or flowery things, dry if possible. I wish to interact with the surrounding environment, its climate and people. Somehow I am making a performance, too. I also use documentary photos and stickers in my working. I have made many environmental artworks and installations in strange places in Finland and abroad, e.g. in Germany and Austria. I mostly use waste, recycled materials and materials from the nature which I collect by myself. My working in Cape Town is part of the Kuopio - Cape Town exchange project Oceans / Deserts Between. Through my working I wish to get contacts with and learn about Greatmore and Woodstock, their people and the nature around.
Kuvaraportti, kuvat Kristiina Korpela 2007.
Oceans Between -projekti jatkui Kuopiossa huhtikuussa 2008. The Oceans Between project continued in Kuopio in April 2008.
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