Saara Vallineva

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf

"The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf" 2017

(Oil on wooden frames and coasters)

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Juggling

Detail of a work in progress. I've used plywood, old frames and wooden coasters for this one.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Other Country - Haihatus Summer Exhibition

"Paradise" 2013

Materials: 20 000 jigsaw puzzle pieces

A House Like Me - Solo Exhibition at Museum of Saarijärvi, Finland

Artist's Residencies in Spain and Italy

Here is some of the watercolor paintings and drawings I finished at Artist's Residencies in Spain and Italy.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Trash Plants

Dhaka, Bangladesh
(Photography by Brittany Mahood)

When I walked in the streets of Dhaka I often couldn’t see a big picture. What I saw was continuity and repetition of details, objects, small events and moments. Among all the trash on the streets I started to notice colorful nets that are used as bags for fruits and food. I started to collect them to make an artwork and it was exciting to find different colors, they became like a small treasure for me. Out of these nets I made “trash plants” and placed them on the streets on dirty spots. I was often so impressed by the kind and joyful hearts of the Bangladeshi people and somehow it made sense for me to place colorful plants on the dirty streets, since in my eyes the people were like color points in a dusty city as well.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Temporary artwork on a transformer at Beatrixpark, Amsterdam (Project realized in collaboration with AkzoNobel and Zuidas)

Sunday, January 30, 2011

A Marginal World

Site-specific installation

Materials: bed sheets, bath towels, night gowns, morning robes, wool mittens and scarves, blankets, sand paper, wood. (Drawings: colour pencil on paper.)

Sunday, October 10, 2010

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.