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The Finnish artist Saara Ekström is known for her unprejudiced material use. Ekström uses mainly organic materials that are rich in controversial meanings and symbolics. Her works often deal with the dualistic, major themes of life: death, birth, growth and withering, beauty and disgust. She has worked with pig meat, fruit, living birds, oysters, milk, different human hairs and blood. The choice of material of certain characteristics, natural processes and behaviour plays a crucial part in the construction of further meanings. |
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The Organic and the Ornament – Kaisa Heinänen
The Finnish artist Saara Ekström is known for her unprejudiced material use. Ekström uses mainly organic materials that are rich in controversial meanings and symbolics. Her works often deal with the dualistic, major themes of life: death, birth, growth and withering, beauty and disgust. She has worked with pig meat, fruit, living birds, oysters, milk, different human hairs and blood. The choice of material of certain characteristics, natural processes and behaviour plays a crucial part in the construction of further meanings.
Ekström’s working method is somewhat similar to that of a scientist’s as it often involves long-term research and following a long, natural process. For the exhibition “Grotesque & Arabesque” in 2005 at Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Ekström produced an installation consisting of a light table loaded with petri dishes that were filled with agar, mould and bacteria. During a certain period of time, the natural growth had formed patterns, like ornaments and geometrical figures on the dishes.
The ornament is an essential visual element that keeps reappearing in Ekström’s opus. However, the artist does not use ornaments in order to increase the aesthetic value of her materials, surfaces or spaces. Instead of aiming solely at the viewer’s fascination by the ornament’s beauty, harmony or predictable character, Ekström’s main strategy is to show the twisted, mystic side of the ornament. This becomes visible when the regular pattern of the ornament is modified or the ornament is produced in an exceptional material or placed in an unusual location. For the Helsinki exhibition, Ekström cut grotesque-like ornaments out of black self-adhesive PVC stickers and conquered the exhibition space with them. The irregular placement and the destruction of the coherence and regularity of the ornament also shed new light on the space itself.
The ornament can also have a strongly temporary and vulnerable character. In a photograph from the series “Grotesque and Arabesque,” a man sees in the bottom of a sink a beautifully balanced but extremely vulnerable ornament formed out of pubic hair. The intimacy of the image is clear, but Ekström also refers to the forbidden character of pubic hair as it links the human to the animal world.
For Ekström, her own body offers almost an unlimited source of material. For the “Grotesque and Arabesque” exhibition, Ekström cut her long red hair, formed ornaments out of the curls, photographed it and printed wallpaper from the photograph. At first glimpse, this reddish, richly decorated wallpaper is like any other, but closer examination reveals its true nature. Hair is traditionally considered the crown of feminine beauty in Western cultures, but when it leaves the body, it transforms mainly into dirt, like all the other excreta of the body. Ekström moves on the borderline between attractiveness and feelings of disgust.
Ekström’s heavy use of decorative elements is interesting when considered in the Scandinavian context. The modern Finnish architecture and design is well known for its minimalism and purity in form and, in former times, the use of ornament was even considered criminal, as it breaks the balance, cleanliness and beauty of the pure form. In Ekström’s art, the origins of the ornament are not to be found in handicrafts but in interiors and in architecture as well as medieval manuscripts and their decoration motifs.
Kaisa Heinänen studied art history at Leiden University (The Netherlands), specializing in video art. She is now based in Helsinki and is working as a writer and curator.
