White Wall | Outi Martikainen: Unordinary Situations 17.9.–5.10.2024

“The artworks in this exhibition were created in collaboration with the Japanese company Buaisou_i during my participation in their residency program in 2023, as well as in subsequent work at the beginning of 2024. For the materials, I used unbleached polyester and linen yarn, woven using a “white on white” digital jacquard weaving technique. The visual structure of the pieces is shaped by the dyeing process, which utilizes traditional Japanese natural indigo, in collaboration with the company’s founder, Kakuo Kaji, in Tokushima.

The themes of the works are connected to a time when I frequently had vivid dreams. In these nocturnal scenes, events and characters appear suddenly, unpredictably, and in contrast to everyday life. One of the themes involved images of football players I collected from newspapers. The highly dance-like poses of the players, frozen in mid-air, caught my interest. These images capture events in millisecond-long pauses. I then imagined the figures landing somewhere else in the next millisecond. In three other works in the exhibition, which utilize the katazome resist-dyeing technique, I have returned to landscapes that exist in the depths of my mind and to which I always return.”