INTIMATIONS and / and / and
Soft Portraits
A series of soft sculptures and texts.
An intimation is never a statement. It arrives sideways — a gesture before the word, a shape before the name.
Intimations and / and / and began on the floor, as fabric. During my previous project, The Outlines, large bands of cotton were laid down to cover the ground while I performed with wet clay — my body moving, sinking, tracing. The fabric became a kind of seismograph, registering the encounter in real time: the affects, thoughts, visions and sensations that pass through a body under clay, left behind as marks of ink and paint.
Once dry, the fabrics were put away. A year later, I opened them again and returned to painting and tracing over the same surfaces — layering a second period of work, a second set of encounters, onto the first. Over time, the clay residue changed the material itself, giving it new texture, new weight, new folds. From these accumulated fabrics — now dense with memory — I began to design a series of soft sculptures. Each one carries, literally in its fibres, a meditative experience: the trace of what happened while I was under clay, across several distinct periods of work.
Alongside the sculptures, I kept a journal during a residency at Lisa Pentti Summer Studio. Excerpts from this writing are attached to the pieces — texts that do not explain the sculptures so much as continue them, extending the same seismographic impulse from body, to cloth, to word.
Intimations and / and / and gathers these soft portraits: not likenesses, but accumulations. Each sculpture — cotton, acrylic, thread, clay, ink — holds a presence rather than depicts one, insisting that a self, or a memory, is never singular but always and, and, and.
What draws me to this process is its capacity to make visible what otherwise stays internal — the negotiations that happen quietly, beneath the surface of a gesture, that rarely find a form. Under clay, something shifts and resolves in the body before it reaches thought; the fabric catches that shift as mark, as trace, as evidence of a passage that would otherwise leave no record. In this sense the sculptures are not portraits of a person so much as portraits of an internal weather — the visible residue of an invisible negotiation.
Because the fabrics were worked, set aside, and returned to a year later, each piece is also an assemblage of different layers of time. A first period of tracing sits beneath a second; a mark made under clay in one season meets a mark made in another, folded now into the same surface, the same object. The sculptures hold these periods simultaneously rather than sequentially — time not as a line but as sediment, layer resting on layer, each one still legible within the next. The sculptures have since been travelling and reshaped by time passing and the clay dusting away.
Project supported by TAIKE – Arts Promotion Centre Finland, as part of its COVID-19 pandemic artist relief funding.
Exhibitions
Galerie Kääntöpaikka, Arabia district, Helsinki — Summer 2022
Studio Galerie Virgiinia, Helsinki — March 2023 to March 2024