Erkki Pirtola's article about Minna Soraluoma's art
From the Cataloque of Turku Biennial 2007
Minna Soraluoma creates her art from contemporary packings. A shopping bag is, after all, a peculiar pack of concepts, in which we carry home the most diverse types of products wrapped in pretty packages. The proportions between their form and content are carefully thought out and their surface patterns designed to please the customer's eye. Nowadays the packings are usually made of plastic, with information on their content printed on them in the most practical and effective way possible. Soraluoma bases her art on this material, which would otherwise end up in the nearest waste bin. Our everyday lives are filled to suffocation with this constant wrapping, unwrapping and throwing away of these plastic and paper mache materials. Frustrated, we increase this mountain of waste every day, but what Soraluoma does is to divert the direction of the waste from the discard department directly on to the walls of an art museum.
If the main form of our culture is waste, we need to ask what is its content? Soraluoma ironically turns the question upside down: by giving the trash a new form she gives it a new content which combines criticism with aesthetics. Ethnofuturistically she "spins" a plastic packing into "yarn" as if it were lamb's wool and uses it to "knit" consumer goods for the eye. They resemble knitted mittens, socks or wall hangings from the old rural world. Her recycled art does not mean to continue the reutilization of the materials - it is a silent laugh at the catastrophe. Plastic is a by-product of the oil industry, a modern glass, alluringly soft and lifelessly sleazy at the same time. It replaced paper and other natural fibres, it became the symbol of modern flow and plastic strength, but it carries a toxin: its hydrocarbon chains are not biodegradable into the natural cycle. Modern man is in love with it and, in a sense, wants to wrap himself in plastic film, away from real life. At the same time he seems to see through the film the triumphant march of death, but does not want to separate with his insulating wrapping, the very cause of the catastrophe!
And yet, Soraluoma does not preach, she merely cuts the baggies into strips and hangs them up as if hanging colourful fans on kiosk walls. Her recycled textiles are also very feminine with lacy patterns. This arch-feminine lacemaking skill, where pattern and repetition are invariably bound to tradition, is transformed by the use of absurd frillings. The absolute and neurotic symmetry of decorative art breaks into a lively inventiveness, and the textile, or should I say "plastile", creates new knittings of the mind. Soraluoma is undoubtedly a "fringe artist", as she exploits this indispensable marginal waste. Her works fascinate people, because they carry three layers of memories. We simultaneously associate them with kindergarten activity, they make us think of granny's cottage and also of our own fridge. "Give us our daily bread bag tearing", could well be the motto woven of plastic, on the wall of the modern plastic granny!
Soraluoma's work also involves collecting and study. Very surely there is an addicted Finnish collector somewhere with a complete collection of plastic bags. Minna Soraluoma is a collector in another sense: she studies the workability and transformability of the materials. It is a question of a playful sociology. Soraluoma is asking about the relationship between the mechanical production of plastic mass, on one hand, and handicraft and an organic human environment, on the other hand. Could art transform waste into treasures and waste mountains into hanging gardens? The artist's own comment is: "I've had food to eat as a by-product of my art material - or was it the other way around?"
Erkki Pirtola
About the writer:
First and foremost an artist, who has written texts about art in
numerous publications since the 1970s. Carried out the DIY Lives project as a documentarist and writer. As a writer he has developed a free artistic expression. where free association and description unite with cultural critique.