Anna Alapuron kotisivu

THE REBIRTH OF HANDIWORKS

A lace curtain, a crocheted rug and a couch pillow have turned into pictures whose source the viewer can mentally trace back to a grandmother’s house or a bric-a-brac store. In her new works, graphic artist Anna Alapuro presents interpretations of a vanishing Finnish reality. She has picked out distinctive details that have more to tell than first meets the eye. Some of us can still find these objects at our homes, some remember carrying them to the trash dump from the house of a deceased relative. Even in old detached houses, few people eat meatballs these days; cooked potatoes have given way to pasta, and handiworks to Ikea.

Alapuro has immortalized crocheted loops and woven threads, whose visuality stems from a chain of generations of women. The ornaments in these objects of everyday use have been inspired by nature, and they replicate shapes whose variations are familiar from all over the world. This creates a path that starts from plants, and branches into primitive ornamental patterns, architecture, art and craftsmanship. The same path can be followed in Alapuro’s artistic output. She has worked organic shapes that reveal cells, blossoms and seeds. The sunny colours further emphasize the natural thematic. Previously, Alapuro abstracted the visual themes so strongly that the works became decorative. They had been inspired by nature, just like the ornamental patterns that date back hundreds of years.

These new works are not decorative; the ornaments themselves have become the focus. With its sincere pursuit for beauty, the realm of handiworks offers a limitless visual archive. Alapuro shows devotion in her treatment of a subject matter that modernism resented. She follows the old tracks loop by loop, mosaic by mosaic. Her works emanate with understanding and humane warmth even for the more banal models of handiworks that have been passed down from one generation to another. The ornamentation of a woven pillow becomes alive in a new way when it is replicated as art. With the changes in material and context, the replication of an ornament is reduced to naturalistic observation, which in itself is free from decorativeness.

The changes become apparent after the scholarship period in Villa Karo, Benin, in the spring of 2003. The same basic approach is still there, but these works were born out of clearly recognizable starting points. Alapuro herself refers to the “Afterimages” series of works as “lookalike pictures”. The topic here is the African visual reality. Nature, textiles and everyday objects have blended into a series of pictures that is bound together by a common aesthetic. As is typical of Alapuro, these works do not share a strong common denominator; instead, their serial nature stems from creative parallelisms. This gives her the freedom to tackle extremely diverse subjects: The rhythmical surface of a lace curtain could be related to the light-reflecting glass wall of a modern office complex.

In her African themes, Alapuro discovered the design of everyday life. She created pictures of decorative objects as well as objects of everyday use, paying special attention to their aesthetics, such as the patterns of a fabric or the shape of a lamp. This sets them clearly apart from her early black-and-white lithographies, where she aestheticized the use of objects. The return of figurativeness nonetheless forms a link to the old prints from the 1980’s.

Anna Alapuro is known for her skillful employment of the carborundum technique. These days, she complements its softness with serigraphy. As of late, she has also returned to working lithography, which she has been teaching for years. Mastering old techniques requires the tenacity and care of a craftsman. It is easy to imagine that in moving from the creation of a picture to processing it, Alapuro feels kinship with lace-makers, African textile printers and rock sculptors of the Antiquity.Alapuro illustrates man’s eternal need to create beauty around himself. It is a consistent choice for an artist who has not been ashamed of her own pursuit of beauty.

Veikko Halmetoja

Translation Mikko Alapuro