Anu Tuominen

Today I am literally feeding my soul off the Anu Tuominen’s work. There are images which amazed me just as much as Chris Larson’s Deep North which I wrote about earlier. Wherever I go I see them like a glare of the sun. Yesterday I passed by the Bozar shop and got myself another beauty fix – a catalogue of Anu Tuominen’s work in a retrospective. I did hesitate a lot between this one and her ‘Thinkables’ book, but I will just end up buying it next week because I can’t have enough. Get ready for a lick of pistachio ice-cream as art!
I love the straightforwardness of her artistic language and the neatness of every detail. She contemplates on colour a lot, regrouping and reclassifying it every time in different poetic meanings. But I especially admire her site-specific installation and this snapshot of ‘For Hibernation’ is the best example.

She plays with clothes a lot, but here the symbolic becomes humorous. And many who might question whether humorous art is art will collate with the similar rhetoric of whether handcraft is an acceptable artistic medium.

I shall not debate on this matter, for I am fascinated with handcraft and the way the ordinary leisure becomes extraordinary form of beauty. The handcraft that for centuries has been condescendingly looked upon is one of the most unique media, as it binds the life of the creator with the life of the creation, and the creator’s life becomes in itself the creation.

This is how Anu Tuominen’s art can be understood – just as a spoon can be understood. Her work is a tool for understanding condensed out of an ordinary object.