During the exhibition, Imagine Everyday! Outsider Art Finland, two new textile artworks by Sonja Jokiniemi will be presented at Institut finlandais.
Sonja Jokiniemi : Work 3, 2023
Sonja Jokiniemi : Work 0, 2022—2023
The two new textile works exhibited at Institut finlandais are part of a series of works originally co-commissioned by HAM – Helsinki Art Museum as part of their exhibition Dance! Movement in the Visual Arts 1880–2020 in 2022.
These loom woven and hand sewn textile works, resembling domestic cloths, with their everyday like patterns and materiality, are flushing out from themselves. Attempting to evoke a sense of the un-controlled and messy in relation to the decorative in visual and embodied expressions with a hint of celebration and joyful resistance through their usage of multiple colours. She then scribbles onto them figures from her drawings, that deal with disproportions and dislocations, figures imagined in different emotional states and situations in life. These figures partly camouflage and partly exhibit themselves as part of the story of the fabric. The artist uses the technique of pulling threads whilst manually weaving the fabrics. Deconstruction and construction are simultaneously at play and the fraying of a cloth creates spaces for the polyphonic, fragmented and entangled. The quality from the line drawing translated into the sewing produces a certain frailty that leaves these figures with a ghostly presence.
The works are related to performative sketches Tap & Pat, that have been shown in museum contexts at HAM – Helsinki Art Museum and Oulu Art Museum, FI. The project has been supported by Moving in November through artistic advice and International distribution and co-produced by the Finnish Institute in France (Institut finlandais).