Monthly Archives: 5月 2010

My work addresses the often-troubled relationship between nature within our bodies and our communities and nature that surrounds us. It is my hope that I may contribute to the urgent and overwhelming need to redefine our relationship to the environment so we may live more gracefully in balance with our resources. Essential to the task of saving ourselves is acknowledging our imagination as part of our resources and part of our nature. My sculptures are premised on the perception that nature is the imagination; that nature is our selves; and that nature is our surroundings however urban, deserted, bucolic, or wild they may be.

I make casts from my own body in positions of contemplation and reverie. The poses capture everyday moments – walking, sitting, driving, in the shower and sleeping – when I am enveloped in thought and absorbed in my imagination. The surfaces of the figures (see Sleeping, 2009) are activated with multiple flowers embedded in the body and formed to contour the gesture. Each flower represents my thoughts as alive as they press and impress a relationship to the world. The sensual color and decadence of the surfaces emphasize a circumference of the body that is greater than its dimensions while extending the aura of the piece toward the viewer. It is important to me that the viewer becomes a player in the piece and that he/she sees their own body in direct relationship with the cast figures and ultimately with the space surrounding both art and audience.

I hope the work conveys both a vulnerable nature and an aggressive one. My need to make them is rooted in an adolescent desire to explore. As I grow older this need includes the responsibility to be more aware of my place in a collective conscious. I aspire to integrate the body, the sensual imagination, and nature into a discussion of the relative place of our selves in culture and in the environment at large.

The works of Anni Rapinoja, who has studied geography and botany, are the results of versatile studies, in which the theory and art are combined. Plants and parts of them, droppings of animals etc. are part of the cycle of the nature. In a certain stage of decomposition they transform to basis for new growth, to humus. The growth of forests, swamps and shores speak to the artist, who refers to willow, moose and reed as her workmates. The essence of the workmate has to be visible; the artist feels to be “only” the medium of this view. Sometimes also eco-energy: sun, wind or water is needed to give shape to the work.