Gallery Vanha Kappalaisentalo, Porvoo, Finland
25.11.2022 - 8.01.2023
Minna Kangasmaa's exhibition highlights observations about the relationship between human and nature, the material world, vitality, connection to the earth, transience, and time - the entanglement of everything.
Kangasmaa's works have taken shape from the echoes of the past. The source material for the works comes from her old sculptures from 1994, placed in a sculpture park in Oulu. These seven life-size plaster figures have almost completely fallen to the ground over time. Kangasmaa has followed the life cycle of the sculptures and finally collected the last pieces shaped by nature and covered with moss, which once represented the personification of the seven virtues. In the exhibition, Kangasmaa returns to the sources of her early work to reflect on being human - in this time. It has led her to multifaceted questions about faith, hope, love, wisdom, courage, justice, and reasonableness.
The exhibition is made up of the remaining plaster hands and feet of the fallen sculpture, as well as photographs, in which the past is present and what once was, still exists. The strong connection of the works to the earth describes something omnipresent, similar to a metaphysical primal force, which is inherent in living processes and controls them. It includes the proposition that the matter that surrounds us is not only passive, raw, or motionless, but vibrant, transforming and actively influencing the non-static.
In her art, Kangasmaa deals with the human relationship with other things and how we use and share natural resources, and how we treat other people, animals, plants and generally everything on this planet, because everything has effects on the present and the future. Kangasmaa's works provide both conceptual and tangible materials to reflect on what kind of ideas people create about themselves and their place in the world.
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.