Art route in De Wijk - Ijhorst, the Netherlands

http://www.grenslooskunstverkennen.nl/

Home Flight

I travel a lot between Finland and Holland. I don’t feel I belong in my home country but I’m not at home in foreign countries either. There is always a question in my mind “where do I belong?” Only time I am free of this questioning is when I travel. I don’t need to feel I belong to a train or an airplane. I am in a between –state. So paradoxically I feel most comfortable and at home while I am travelling.

I know an object, whether it is a house or a mug, does not last forever. Yet I believe it does. My mind cannot comprehend that an object could contain a possibility not to exist. I perceive the world as ever being without a possibility of it not being.

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”

(Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 1992)

When I live in a house I believe it to be stable. When I come to realize its instability I feel betrayed. When my grandfather died, my grandparents’ house was sold and torn down. I went to see what had been done to the property and was shocked. The house, garden and trees were gone, there was nothing left but ground. A year later a new house had been built there, trees cut down and grass had been covered by pavement. Without knowing the location I couldn’t have recognized it. I kept wondering about the intensity of the shock it caused. It made me realize I can think I know things are not everlasting but still I don’t really know it, not even when I see it.

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”

(Alain de Botton)

When I travel I don’t get the feeling of being betrayed. I am on my way to somewhere; I inhabit a change and even become one with it. Just like “furniture insists that we cannot change” so does a travel insist that I am constantly changing. I feel freedom while travelling; I am free of trying to belong and to behave in a certain way.

Installation at Kunstvlaai art fair, Amsterdam, 2010, size 3mx3mx2,5m
http://www.kunstvlaai.nl/2010/2010/05/home-flight-saara-vallineva/
http://www.kunstbeeld.nl/00/KB/nl/469_483/nieuws/13719/Kunstvlaai_2010.html

Power of copy, Xuzhou Museum of art, Xuzhou, China

Applied arts dept Sandberg Instituut paricipated the show Power of Copy in Xuzhou Museum of art, Xuzhou, China

http://power-of-copy.blogspot.com/

DOEN Materiaalprijs nomination 2009

Dutch design week, Eindhoven 2009

http://www.doen-materiaalprijs.nl/index.php?lng=#vorigeEdities

(no title) 2009 materials: plasti bowls, crocheted yarn

grandparents' house

Jupperi

My grandparents’ house.

It stayed the same,

I would always know where to find things, mints, a phonebook, a comb...

The house was torn down, it exists no more

The house started to come to my dreams.

House can be half empty, furniture changes.

I find new rooms, up close to the ceiling or under the floor.

They are small and narrow spaces,

between-places, dream- and memory places.

"Moon" 2009

(Pictures from the solo show "Parallel worlds" at Gallery BE19 Helsinki, Finland)

I had a dream I travelled to the Moon. It felt so real that after that everytime I looked at the Moon I was sure I had been there. In the dream I felt that I was complitely alone in a place that was exciting, strange and isolated from everything else. What fascinated me most was the fact that I really enjoyed that loneliness. I was having an adventure inside my mind, in my subconscious. I don’t need company in that place. It’s my own world. That is also very self-centered way to think. It’s like I wouldn’t want to face the real world.

When I actually started my work many things changed. I was in a new country, in a strange place and I unconsciously started to combine my moon world and this new world where I was. Everyday I walked to school through a park. That felt comforting to me at least of two reasons. Firstly, it was beautiful and secondly, it was something that was stable. A new country felt chaotic and I needed something safe. In the beginning I was going to make the moonlandscape a cold place. But I needed a safe place. A place that I could feel comfortable in and I think that is the biggest reason my Moon started to become warm. And a surface of it started to look like the park I walked through at mornings.

Being in the Moon or in a new country is like being in chaos. I decided to jump into chaos but same time I couldn’t stand it. I can’t stay in chaos without trying to organize it. It is like a part of me is willing to change and another part of me wants to change the surroundings. There is always the tension between. I go to a new place because I want to grow but in the new place I immediately start to look for safety.