Skin as Shelter: Material and Mythological Research during the HIAP Residency

During my HIAP Learning Materials residency in Suomenlinna, I developed my material and mythological research practice centered on transformation: turning one thing into another, finding one form inside another, and allowing materials to move between vegetal, animal, human, and mythical states.

I began from the idea that environments communicate through materials. Plants and animals can appear to express emotions through their surfaces, environments can mirror myths, and myths can mirror the environments from which they emerge. For me, myth is a way of creating empathy and mapping relationships between humans, other species, landscapes, and materials. Rather than depicting and working with existing stories, I developed new myths from what I encountered around me in Suomenlinna. The environment became a source of characters, bodies, creatures, and stories. It naturally shows a viewer a mind of a local inhabitant and I tried to see what my mind could pick up from the environment that surrounded me, while also talking to local people and being exposed to finnish stories written prior.

A central method in my research was mirroring. I looked for forms that could transform through resemblance. Seaweed could become hair or wet animal fur. When hardened, seaweed could resemble the beard of a selkie. Stars, fences, rocks, plants, and other forms found in the environment became starting points for imagined bodies. Through these transformations, I move between vegetal, animal, human, and mythical identities.

I became interested in shifting states between living and decaying substances, and between what is considered beautiful and ugly. I experimented with kombucha leather, leather, seaweed, organic matter, wood, steel, and foraged materials, using drying, hardening, sewing, fermenting, and preserving as sculptural processes. I started thinking about preservation almost like making jam, except that instead of preserving something to eat, I preserve organic materials as sculptures.

This led to my sculptures made from steel skeletons with changeable leather and kombucha skins. I imagine these structures as flowers with human bodies inside them , flowers that are actually people from the island disguising themselves as plants. The skeletons can remain the same while their skins change, so one structure can become many different bodies. These sculptures suggest camouflage, masking, transformation, and the possibility of becoming something other than what you appear to be.

One of the myths I developed is about glowing rocks along the sea. At night, when walking by the water, rocks and cliffs can seem to come out of the sea and shine like amber. In my story, these rocks are mysterious beings that appear at night and sometimes confuse or deceive people and sailors, drawing them towards the shore. The landscape becomes a living presence with its own behaviour and intentions.

Another creature I imagined is the tree sheep: small green sheep that live among the lichens on trees. Their fur resembles the surface of the tree, making them difficult to see. Sometimes they jump down, and if you are lucky, you might catch one. This creature comes from a fallen piece of tree and lichen on it, my interest in camouflage and in the boundary between plant and animal, where one form can disguise itself as another. lichen looks like sheep, lives on the tree , tree becomes sheep.