Helena Vatanen between artisan and artist

By Tero Huotari.

Helena Vatanen is a Finnish artist living in Prague.
She graduated from Art school Maa (2000-2004),
located on the picturesque island of Suomenlinna in
Helsinki, Finland. She spent her final year at Maa abroad,
expanding her studies in The Netherlands.
Her keen interest in the practice of art however
began some two decades ago in her native Joensuu.

There are two inseparable aspects to understanding
Vatanens art: craft and style. As a painter her range is
based on solid understanding of classical techniques,
be the subject representation or abstract.
Beside traditional landscapes she has a longstanding
keen interest and ability in portraiture, both formal and
experimental, representing varied states of human
existence and social standing.

The craft manifests itself best in the latest works, starting
from 2004.Soon after graduating the abstract entered her
ouvre. Whilst starting harpsichord decorating in
The Netherlands in association with master builder
Jukka Ollikka, she felt free to experiment with the
moreintangible aspects of art in expressive abstraction.
Along with this came experimentation with materials.
The craft of decorating traditional harpsichords evoked
in her questions of the differences between the skills of a
craftsman, ars , and art, as they were very similar up until
the Romanticist period beginning in the 18th century.

Vatanen now works with the same materials as the
harpsichord builder, the wood decades old, and combines
traditional methods in unexpected ways. She for instance
weaves wood with wire into abstract tapestries, often inflicting
on herself the same physical injuries as a constructor.
Painting is still involved, as she colours the small fragments
of wood to form mosaics. One such piece contains over 2000
small cubes of wood, comprising works on the scale of the
human physique. These intricate pieces require lengthy
processes to form, and demonstrate what Vatanen has
been looking for: meditative concentration.

It is this quiet concentration that she saw in her foreparents
at work.“There is some similarity with the way my grandmother
used to make pullovers for grandchildren and my turning a
metal hook over and over again into piece of wood. The only
difference is the contextI am targeting”, she says.

This new fragmentality that requires great care and long
periods tocome about used to be a staple of master workers,
now nearly xtinct under demands for efficiency and
speediness. An example of critique on fragmented society
can be viewed in the large piece”Puzzle”, consisting of wood
in classical puzzle shapes, painted in an expressionist fashion
in blacks and whites with a few bright specks, garnished with
words, broken up, and rearranged into a quiet andbeautiful
monumentfor silence.I see this as a directionfor Vatanen's
work.

Tero Huotari is a visual artist based in Helsinki. He is currently
writing on cinema for his MA thesis in aesthetics at the
University of Helsinki and has previously written about art for
the webzine Mustekala, amongst others, at
www.mustekala.info (nb: mainly in finnish).