Ville Vuorenmaa, It is Only the End of the World, 2021
Ville Vuorenmaa (b.1980 Lapua, Finland) is a visual artist, songwriter and musician. Currently, Vuorenmaa is living with his family in Oulu, Finland. Vuorenmaa has been focusing on watercolour painting for several years now. Subject matter in his paintings is often personal. Vuorenmaa likes to combine images with texts.
I did the work improvising it along the way during spring and summer 2021. The picture resembles a message or a notice board. There are small bits of drawing/painting/text done on a piece of paper that I had with me for some months in my backpack. I liked the idea that the image and the paper have aged - that the passing of time has left its marks on the work.
I personally don’t like to be touched so I rarely get my hair done. I wanted to capture that moment of how it feels for me in the first hour of braiding since I can’t quite put it into words. There’s anxiety but also excitement. A feeling of foreignness but also of belonging, warmth and kinship. It’s ordinary and also a special occasion.
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In this project, 100 letters were sent to the friends, relatives and acquaintances of the organizing team. The letter described how much we missed their hugs, which had been withheld for a year due to COVID. The addressees were asked to send us an item of clothing that was old, worn out, and had seen its last days in their closet.
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A specimen-style diagram on flower assemblage in preparation for ‘rooting’ delves into the topics of how to re-assemble oneself to set roots somewhere. Do we change ourselves and re-assemble our features to be allowed to remain in the garden, or do we tend a small corner in a garden of our own? Often ‘belonging’ is a concept that exists within change. We can belong to many contradictory concepts, not necessarily following a specific blueprint.
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Perhaps what makes me who I am is not only the things I have now but also the things I have lost or I long for.
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