Lipponen, Sanna: Windthrow – Critique
”Inka-Maaria Jurvanen has created her works with a pencil on plywood, tree burls and marble slabs. The ambience of the pieces is strange and fascinating – one is pretty much forced to meet and taste the logic of disintegration conveyed by them.
A windtrow is a tree felled by the wind. It’s better to leave this fallen tree alone if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. A tree can fall over a bump on the ground, over another tree, or stay upright and lean on the trees growing around it. In these situations, the tree trunk bends and tenses. And when it’s cut, it can pop back up.
Tensions and stored potential energy are also available at Inka-Maaria Jurvanen’s Windtrow exhibition at tm•gallery. Jurvanen has executed her works with pencil on plywood, tree burls and marble slabs.
The exhibition features two large drawings – plywood triptychs standing on the floor. Both have a lot going on in them. They are swarming with lumpy shapes, strange insects and other animals, and limbs that appear out of nowhere or disappear into it.
The atmosphere of the works is strange and fascinating. Landscapes drawn on plywood boards seem to be bathing in the warm and bright light of the moon – or several moons, because the shadows of objects floating or lying in the same space fall in several directions.
In the work Lewdness of Disintegration (2019–2020), the same view of the room seems to be repeated in all three parts of the triptych. There is a window, the landscape behind it, a strange lump on the windowsill and a radiator below, and the floor and walls of the surrounding room.
Like still images of different stages of hallucination, the views change from one image to another. Planets, maybe plane wrecks or open landscapes from which the silhouettes of a deer or some other animal stand out are flying behind the window. The radiator under the windowsill shrinks or starts to change shape. Tiny human figures drip across the floor, headless deer drop their miniature antlers, and beaded, round shapes float in space. Everything in the pictures seems to be in a state of slow disintegration, breaking down and change.
Jurvanen’s line is assertive and vivid. The contours are dark and determined, the shadows a soft haze. The material choices are also surprising and bring their own addition to each piece in the form of wood grain, marble lines and patterns of the tree burls. In the works Wind Sniffer (2022) and Parking in Shadows (2022), the marble’s smoothly polished porous surface is like the skin of the stone, and the drawing lines on it appear like amazingly fine mist.
The works drawn on the tree burls protrude from the walls in a three-dimensional, even limb-like manner. The material’s own patterns stand out on the outside of burls, and the drawings inside them look like tattoos, adapted to the uneven concave shape.
The exhibition as a whole is coherent, fresh and peculiar. One is left to ponder, weigh and wonder the logic of disintegration conveyed by the works. Together with the drawing line, shapes and images are broken and reborn.
Inka-Maaria Jurvanen: Windthrow at tm·gallery until February 12, 2023”
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