Helena Vatanen between artisan and artist

By Tero Huotari.

Helena Vatanen is a Finnish artist living in Prague. She graduated from Art school Maa (2000-2004), located on the picturesque island of Suomenlinna in Helsinki, Finland. She spent her final year at Maa abroad, expanding her studies in The Netherlands. Her keen interest in the practice of art however began some two decades ago in her native Joensuu.

There are two inseparable aspects to understanding Vatanens art: craft and style. As a painter her range is based on solid understanding of classical techniques, be the subject representation or abstract. Beside traditional landscapes she has a longstanding keen interest and ability in portraiture, both formal and experimental, representing varied states of human existence and social standing.

The craft manifests itself best in the latest works, starting from 2004. Soon after graduating the abstract entered her ouvre. Whilst starting harpsichord decorating in The Netherlands in association with master builder Jukka Ollikka, she felt free to experiment with the more intangible aspects of art in expressive abstraction. Along with this came experimentation with materials. The craft of decorating traditional harpsichords evoked in her questions of the differences between the skills of a craftsman, ars,and art, as they were very similar up until the Romanticist period beginning in the 18th century.

Vatanen now works with the same materials as the harpsichord builder, the wood decades old, and combines traditional methods in unexpected ways. She for instance weaves wood with wire into abstract tapestries, often inflicting on herself the same physical injuries as a constructor. Painting is still involved, as she colours the small fragments of wood to form mosaics. One such piece contains over 2000 small cubes of wood, comprising works on the scale of the human physique. These intricate pieces require lengthy processes to form, and demonstrate what Vatanen has been looking for: meditative concentration.

It is this quiet concentration that she saw in her foreparents at work. “There is some similarity with the way my grandmother used to make pullovers for grandchildren and my turning a metal hook over and over again into piece of wood. The only difference is the context I am targeting”, she says.

This new fragmentality that requires great care and long periods to come about used to be a staple of master workers, now nearly extinct under demands for efficiency and speediness. An example of critique on fragmented society can be viewed in the large piece ”Puzzle”, consisting of wood in classical puzzle shapes, painted in an expressionist fashion in blacks and whites with a few bright specks, garnished with words, broken up, and rearranged into a quiet and beautiful monument for silence. I see this as a direction for Vatanen’s work.

Tero Huotari is a visual artist based in Helsinki. He is currently writing on cinema for his MA thesis in aesthetics at the University of Helsinki and has previously written about art for the webzine Mustekala, amongst others, at www.mustekala.info (nb: mainly in finnish).