“Climate Change” group exhibition: Mid Wales Art Centre spring 2021

I’ve always been interested in the survival of the individual self in the face of the threatening Other, and paradox as key to a reconciliation of opposites. I’m especially fascinated with the liminal state between inner and outer, visible and invisible. I typically work by layering images to create a sense of the ambiguity of the inner world. It is there, that a sense of identity and wholesome relationships emerges and transforms. An understanding of the inner realm forms the foundation for a responsible restructuring of the external environment. It is only within, that the chasm between self and Other can be overcome so that both can thrive on equal terms.

As a Finnish national now resident in Wales and as a person with life long disabilities, I’ve always struggled with disorder, ambiguity, transition, change and the problematic concept of self-identification when nothing seems stable and safe. In line with my personal experiences of liminality, climate change echoes the painful process humans are forced to face when they are called to expand their idea of self and take adult responsibility not only for the health of their mind and body, but also their actions in the world. The chaos that ensues when false idea of health and prosperity crumble, puts everything we know into question.

In ‘Ciara in my Mind’ (photography, 2020), I have layered several photographs to create an impression one of the devastating storms we experienced in 2020. When storm Ciara was howling and battering outside and I was huddling indoors, I wondered how you could poignantly represent something as visually challenging, chaotic and fleeting as wind, rain and flooding - a savage, natural process that you typically don’t even get to see because you’re trying to escape it. And perhaps my point is, we must face and acknowledge the problems of the past and use our imaginations constructively in order to become a vehicle for the creation of a positive future. The monsters are really lurking inside us, and they are asking to be seen.

In ‘Phoenix’ (photography, 2019), several photographs have been layered to create the impression of destruction and change. The figure is my grandmother Edith von Bonsdorff who was a prima ballerina with the avant garde Swedish Ballet (Ballets Suédois) a hundred years ago. In fact, she was the lead ballerina in the dadaist ballet Relâche by Francis Picabia, with music by Eric Satie (Relâche means a show is cancelled). The show was the only one of its kind and a forerunner of performance art. In this image from a different show that Edith probably choreographed herself, she is impersonating a slave. (I have repurposed her stage photo to create a new idea of a stage, and so the idea of recycling things and ideas becomes part of the work.) I do see the world as a stage upon which we all perform our part through the construction and destruction of our self identity and the precariously balanced reality that surrounds us. But everything changes when you snap out of your solipsistic madness and start taking charge of the play. Then perhaps like the Phoenix, we’ll rise from the ashes.

N.B. Due to Covid, you need to make an appointment to see the exhibition in the physical world. However, it is also available to view online from the 15th April, so head over to the Mid Wales Art Centre website and enjoy it from the comfort of your couch!

Vivi-Mari Carpelan: Phoenix (photography 2019)

‘Outdoors:Indoors’ (DAC 2020)

Response

Three photographic works: ‘Imagination’. ‘Impression’, ‘Memory’ (2020) by Vivi-Mari Carpelan

(photos further down the page)

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been interested in expressing ways in which the intangible self comprehends itself in relation to the body, its environment, and the collective mind. To me, the world has been a stage upon which I have acted out my world view and the exhausting process of managing an unmanageable body. I’ve attempted to expose the otherwise invisible inner processes of transformation, mental processing and existential query through various artistic media. I’ve been especially fascinated with the expression of beauty through roughness and decay, and have enjoyed collaging and layering images and sounds in order to create a sense of deeper emotional truths. 

Over the years, I’ve experienced increasing limitations on my ability to engage with the external world, and this has had a great impact on my art. Due to different kinds of physical limitations, I’ve had to simplify the artistic processes. In the past few years, I’ve done most of my work on an iPhone in a simple app for double exposure that encourages new associations and happy accidents, all the while reclining comfortably on my couch.

The more isolation and physical limitations I experience, the more urgently my memories seem to call on my attention. I’m forced to retreat into my inner world and explore it to the best of my ability. But I suffer from a degree of aphantasia, so my memories are not visually clear at all. To help recall visual experiences of the past, I layer photos I’ve taken in the past with current ones taken in my immediate surroundings. By layering several images I’m able to conjure up an impression of reality that says as much about my way of perceiving and processing reality, as it says about the way I observed the environment in the past. My work lies at the crossroads of inner and outer reality, in the mental melting pot where deeper meaning emerges out of a visual perception of the external world.

The series of work I’m presenting for ‘Outdoors:Indoors’ hovers in the liminal space between the reality I have perceived in the past, and how I imagine this reality in the present. A raging storm, an eerily silent church yard and the negative space of an ancient castle, may not represent your typical ideas of the beautiful Welsh landscape. This is, however, how it presents itself as a conglomerate in my immediate surroundings, in my photos, in my memory and in my imagination. The scenery appears empty because I am not there. I am not sure I dare imagine a future with myself out in the world.

The images were conceived during times of rampant storms, floods and a great pandemic. The great outdoors becomes a stage upon which the great forces of nature act and impress themselves on our bodies and minds and change our lives forever, but to appreciate the process is to imagine it.

The work is printed and framed in size 40x50 cm oak frames.

Artist Statement:

In this work, I have layered photographs to express how my perception of external reality becomes an internal experience of the imagination. Some of the photos were taken in Aberystwyth back when I could still travel, while others were shot right outside my door and from my window. 

Physical restrictions have compelled me to invent an uncomplicated way of working. I superimpose my photos on an iPhone in creative dialogue with a simple digital algorithm. I try things out and play rather than set out to control the outcome. Despite the relaxed  approach, the layering transforms simple snapshots into complex imagery that feels intentional, personal and true. The method reflects my belief that limitations can encourage an expansion of the mind.

My pieces represent the ambiguous, yet stratified, workings of the human mind. Past, present and future coalesce in my headspace: memories of beautiful places co-exist with an appreciation of my immediate surroundings. All the while, the tormenting fear of never ending isolation sets the emotional tone. In addition, the forces of nature that battered our homes earlier in 2020, and the eerie stillness of death that surrounds us, all form part of a general need to cry and let go. 

There is a more detailed description of my intentions in the ‘Artwork’ section: Photography 2018-2020: Mind Stuff (2020).

Audio description of the work:

For this year’s Disabiity Arts Cymru art exhibition, the selected artists were asked to participate in a workshop about audio describing their work to a visually impaired audience. I found it quite an interesting exercise and had a difficult time keeping the descriptions as short as possible. Due to worsening Hyperacusis (pain from sounds) someone else will record the blurbs.

Imagination

// This is a photograph consisting of several superimposed images that create the visual impression of a storm. The subtle monochrome hues of grey and the misty atmosphere contribute to a sense of eeriness. Images of the trunks and branches of deciduous trees have been layered to create the sense of a forest battered by a strong wind. The left hand side is in the shadow, while the right hand side bathes in light. There are strong streaks and small blotches across the landscape that suggest the movements of the storm, and a flock of birds seem to be struggling against the wind. // 

Impression

// This is a photograph consisting of subtly layered images in soft hues of grey, and it looks misty, eerie and slightly surreal. There’s a spacious cemetery with tall trees to the left, straight rows of gravestones, and an erratically placed telephone pole in the middle. The background has faded into white nothingness. There’s soft, watery texture all across the picture that suggests looking through a window that’s battered with rain, and this makes the image seem dreamy. You can just about make out the shape of some trees that could, in fact, be a reflection in the window. It looks incredibly quiet, as though time has stopped. //

Memory

// This is an inverted photograph based on several superimposed images, so dark objects appear light grey against a dark grey backdrop. There’s a subtle sense of spatial distortion and ghostliness. In the background to the left, you can make out the tall Victorian memorial in Aberystwyth, some trees in the middle, and an old castle ruin in the foreground to the right. Four large migrating swans are traversing the image from right to left. The scene is reminiscent of a fading, misremembered and slightly jumbled memory. //

CONCLUSION

Due to Covid, the exhibition isn’t currently on tour, but will be presented as an online magazine until further notice. Sadly the judges of the show didn’t appreciate the thought I had put into this work. The many layers of imagery and meaning attempted to address the ambiguity between indoors and outdoors and ways in which photos and the immediate environment can serve as a point of reference for an internal process of the mind. Most importantly, I was trying to answer the question ‘what do you do if you cannot go out and take part in the beautiful Welsh landscape’. My simple answer is that you resort to your imagination. However, I am not simply pointing to the products of the imagination. Instead, I have tried to show glimpses of the inner workings of the mind themselves, as well as the ways in which I speak in dialogue with technology in order to illustrate the external, technical aspect of this process. One reflects the other in endless feedback loops. I encourage the viewer to look at the work in terms of a multifaceted reality that isn’t only about the things we see with our own eyes. I nevertheless, also want to express gratitude for the privilege of living in a country that has beauty everywhere, and not just in beauty spots. The views from my windows are really astonishing.

Disintegration and reintegration go hand in hand

Apparently I tend to sit with my feet inwards like this, and I guess it must be a symptom of my wonky bone structure and the laxity of the joints. My mum pointed it out to me once. It was Halloween, so I decided to look like a pumpkin (okay it wasn’t on purpose). On this occasion, I was feeling tired and nervous about saying anything about my work to a group of people. This photo was taken by a fellow artist..

Manifestation I-III

The artists group that has been running for a year now, has kept me on my toes despite the consequences of some very serious medical mishaps that I’ve had to endure since March. There has been plenty of opportunities to show work locally, so I’ve had to sit down and push my ambitions. As always, I’m keen to explore ambiguity and liminality through the method of double exposure, and feel that I’ve made some progress. Although I’d decided to keep other people’s images out of my work, I did concede for the sake of creating a series with a strong theatrical component.

The inspiration to this work was my grandmother Edith von Bonsdorff, who was an acclaimed prima ballerina over in Finland in the first half of the 19th Century. I have been sorting out her legacy, which was basically some photos, costume drawings, written documents and medals, and donated a good part of it to the Dance Museum in Stockholm (They are in fact celebrating the 100th year anniversary of Les Ballets Suedois this autumn). The immersion in Edith’s artistic and rather ‘Bloomsbury-like’ bohemian cum aristocratic past gave me a bit of release from all the heavy stuff going on in my life and in the world at the moment. The feedback has also confirmed that people find these images a welcome reflection on more pleasant states of mind.

This is a bit like another posthumous collaboration, not all that dissimilar, in fact, to the video work ‘A Life Unremarked’. My husband had made the images (in 2014), and I provided the sound track (in 2015). What’s really upsetting to me, however, is that Edith corresponded with Giorgio de Chirico, but deemed the exchange private and burnt the letters. Privacy is an illusion, because eventually everything we own becomes part of the collective past! In this sense, the dead are very much part of the living. And I don’t think we should deprive humanity of our stories, because there is a constant need for new ones.

As I have stated elsewhere, de Chirico’s surreal art work, which he himself called ‘metaphysical’, have inspired me a great deal - possibly more than any other artist. I’m very pleased to have had the chance to roam in London while my husband was still alive, and photograph the city. These photographs now serve as the basis for my own metaphysical city scapes.

Here’s what I wrote for my website:

The stage is a series of photographs with an element of digital collage. I have used old photographs of my Danish-Finnish grandmother Edith von Bonsdorff, who was an acclaimed modernist prima ballerina and choreographer from 1919 onwards. She worked with some of the great avant-garde choreographers, artists and musicians of her time and was a lead dancer in the one and only Dadaist performance, Relâche, in Paris and the USA in 1924. It was choreographed by Francis Picabia and the music was by Eric Satie. By staging her dance poses in surreal cityscapes entirely based on the superimposition of my own photographs, I have created an impression of the paradox of performance.

On the one hand, Edith was photographed on stage while deeply immersed in her own inner world, seemingly oblivious of the observer. On the other hand, I have placed her in a contemporary environment of my own making in a way that creates an ambiguous sense of space. In some of the work, it looks as though she is reflected in a window, while simultaneously part of a dreamlike cityscape outside. Because she’s looking away rather than into the camera, it is as though I have taken her place but with the uncanny ability of watching her mirror image without the meeting of the eyes. Her external reality becomes an image of her internal self, but reimagined by myself. As a proponent of modern dance, she might have appreciated my attempt at a posthumous dialogue.

There is an ambiguity as to the identity of the observer, which is further enhanced by the fact that this work will also be seen by other people. The work becomes a contemplation on the many faceted nature of our perception of the inner and outer world. The double exposure of the two realities allows us to perform our parts in life as though we were indeed staging a performance in the theatre of life. It’s the ability to withdraw from external reality and deliberate through inner imagery and thoughts that helps objectify and learn from the roles we play. Ultimately, one may ask how authentic a person can truly be, and how the process of developing an identity becomes an exercise in choreography.

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Reverie

A poem for Shadowland

At Mid Wales Art Centre, my piece Shadowland was shown as part of an exchange between visual artists and poets called ‘Inspired’. I was thrilled that Jackie Biggs chose my piece and wrote the following poem in response to it, and that it reflected my feelings and intentions so incredibly well. Jackie is a published poet living in Wales. Her blog is, incidentally, called ‘The spaces in between’.

Leaves and leavings

Her memories are fragments

taken from a wreckage of smashed mirrors,

pieced back together

so that her recollections

are only reflections of each other.

Misremembered pieces

imitate but falsify

and she no longer understands

that what she recalls

are only distorted images.

Layers of shadow on shadow

show that nothing is what it seems –

not in the past or present.

She weaves the spectres

of mis-shapen memories into tapestry

makes a new collage

layer on layer

angular fragment on fragment

and she looks through

a window, but sees

into a twisted looking glass,

her view veiled

by an apparition of herself.

Still she sees leaves,

even among winter bare trees…

leaves and phantoms of leaves,

remembrance of leavings;

and he is there, his silhouette

down there among the gravestones.

She watches where he looks

but whatever he remembers,

whatever he sees,

his memories and recollections

are obscured by light.

Inner Transformation

In this piece, I have combined several photographs, including a self portrait and the facade of a building undergoing construction work found in London once. It expresses an idea of inner reconstruction. My work explores the way in which my sense of self depends on memories and impressions from my external environment. I see the external and internal environment as inextricably interdependent, but also subject to a tug of war that pushes for change. It is an amalgam of visible and invisible aspects of reality that form an ever changing mental environment that I identify as myself. The layering of three to five photographs creates an impression of the fluid realm of the inner world, as well as the transformative forces within that can inspire various ways of reinventing the self.

My eight pieces from the series ‘Terraforming the Self’ (renamed ‘Inner Transformation’ to better suit the theme) was shown in the ‘Hidden’ exhibition at Mid Wales Art Centre in the summer 2019. Read more about the work on in the section ‘iPhoneography 2018-2019.

About the work 'Hypnagogia I-III' (2018)

Even when the external reality is the object, paintings and drawings on 2D surfaces, as well as video work, offer the impression of a ‘window’ onto an inner reality. Art works as they appear on canvas, paper or monitors, are in themselves liminal objects that are neither useful products that help us live our daily lives, nor actual windows into the inner world of meaning. Instead, art in its many forms acts as a bridge between observer and observed. This encounter coincides with the meeting of the external and the internal realm. Ultimately, the art work also provides a connecting point between the artist and an audience. Perhaps it seems self evident but in a deeper sense this demonstrates a crucial facet of our reality. It’s the eye of the Other that allows the self to identify as a self.

As the purpose of art is to evoke the human perception of reality in non-factual terms, it is mainly suggestive. Art works offer impressions of reality that are filtered through an artist’s subjective perception of their external and internal reality. The involvement of their actual ‘self’ is a strangely ambiguous affair that can never really be straightforward, and is often lost in translation.  Although the artistic outcome is governed by an artist’s ability to convey their thoughts and feelings with flair, there is a general consensus that a less controlled and conscious approach will engender a more truthful impression of the inner self. Depending on their level of skill and ability to give themselves to the process, who the artist thinks they are in the moment of creative conception is thus variable and more or less successfully conveyed onto the canvas or sheet of paper. But getting lost in creative flow means that the experience can only be analysed in hindsight, and that’s when the sense of self is returned. 

We all tend to gravitate towards an expression of the human form as the vehicle of emotion, and identify with the natural world as an expression of our connection to it. As viewers, we tend to anchor our perception of random shapes and forms by lending them the characteristics of people, animals and landscapes. 

An attempt to break away from the representation of the external world in favour of a more abstract approach lies at the heart of modern art, of course. The dissolution of comfortingly familiar shapes and forms challenges our habitual view of reality and helps us embrace change and transformation in its multitude of forms. Conservative ideologies that resist change have nothing against the fundamental forces of nature - we can try all we want, but we cannot prevent ourselves from being an integral part of the tumult of these forces . Art is a mirror of the acceptance of the underlying intelligence of life. Not only does it say a lot about the way an artists handles reality and how their idea of self is informed by their external circumstances. Perhaps more than anything, it also exemplifies the way humans collectively try to reconcile with the relentlessly chaotic processes everyone has to put up with in order to become the best they can possibly be. 

The process of making art challenges an individual’s idea of self, their sense of personal boundaries and the way in which their self occupies an aspect of reality. In short, the way an artist fills up the limited, flat area of a piece of paper offers clues about their inner reality, and the forms they choose to project onto it, are indicative of their idea of self. Yet in my experience it is a very imprecise measure of who a person really is. Although art bears the mark of an individual, to me it seems that rather than calling it a mirror of an inner self, it’s more appropriate to call it the reflection of an investigative and restructuring process of the mind.

As an experiment, I wanted to break away from two things that had preoccupied me in the past: the appropriation of copy right free material from the archives of the collective mind, and the habitual use of figures to express subjective feeling. The image of humans inhabiting an imaginary space on a flat piece of paper was troubling me. The emergence of figures during the process seemed to compel me to think about the temporary conditions of my life circumstances, and I wanted to get away from the narrowness of this view. Whether or not the images looked like me, they would invariably express my ideas about the human condition from my current perspective. This representational way of working held me captive to a conventional story line about a self that one could project as an image, and manipulate through paints and crayons in order to express a variety of psychological conditions that seemed to belong to it. I was troubled that for as long as I incorporated the figures of humans into the work, I could not get away from the expression of a limited idealised self and its narrow-minded subjective point of view. It was all very well to communicate this particular appreciation of reality and share it with others who were able to relate to it. But I wanted to liberate myself from my current self-centred narrative at least a little bit and see if I could distance myself from the stories about the human condition and the emotions that we all share.

Seeing that my life circumstances confined me to working on a 2D surface, I had to accept the limitations of the neatly circumscribed arena or ‘flat theatrical stage’ of a sheet of paper. I decided to do away with the human figure and express a less ego-centric approach to reality. The work would still be a testimony of my individuality. But maybe my efforts to dissolve form would stipulate an illusion of distance. like a softened version of objectivity without the association to cold, clinical fact. The result became a meditation on the way in which both a subjective and objective view point could co-exist as a less tightly wound expression of who I currently think I am.

It was quite interesting, that the pain and exhaustion caused by my physical disability was preventing me from making strong marks with pens and crayons. As soon as I started to get nit picky about the quality of my lines, my hand started to cramp. I was working on big sheets of Indian Khadi paper (70x50 cm) that I’d inherited from my deceased husband. Tte fair size of the paper and my attempts to loosen up my work process forced me to move around a lot and bend over in ways that challenged my physical stamina. In the end, I could only do what I could do. But I did find a painterly way of working that overruled rationality and put me in greater touch with my feeling self. In addition, I played with chance in order to create a greater sense of the organic uncontrolled movement of life itself.

The emerging work became an image of process. More specifically, it mirrored my understanding of the space between the visible external and invisible internal reality, and thus continued my previous explorations of liminality. The name ‘Hypnagogia’ is derived from sleep research, and it denotes the stage between wakefulness and sleep. During this stage, the perception of physical reality breaks down. Rational thoughts turn into irrational ones. After a period of dreamless sleep, consciousness undertakes hallucinatory journeys marked by a lack of all the physical constraints that come with life in the waking world. My work plays with the idea that you cannot appropriately describe on a physical piece of paper how the physical turns into the non-physical. You can only do your best to suggest it. On the other hand, the nature of ambiguity is best expressed in ambiguous terms, and it is something other than a logical analysis. (You might ask whether the brain is doing the hallucinating. This is not the place for an in-depth discussion about the nature of consciousness and whether or not the experience can be reduced to neurological activities in the brain. Suffice to say that I am not personally in the least bit interested in the brain though it obviously has its place as a coordinator of perception.)

When an individual falls asleep, the conscious self-agency breaks down in favour of a narrative they cannot control, and unless the dreamer is lucid, it’s seen from the point of view of a self that does not comprehend itself as a self. Like the skilful artist has to surrender to mind wandering and the expression of spontaneous creative gestures, the individual has to surrender to the process of falling asleep and allowing their unconscious to do its job. 

When the propensity for a surrender of the conscious sense of self is hampered, the creative aspect of one’s being is also challenged. One could say with the Chinese that the waters are muddy and do not clear up as efficiently as they would during periods of good health. My artistic work is the paradoxical outcome of a great struggle with this particular aspect of reality. I felt that by removing references to the human form and conjuring up as non-generic a world of form as I could possibly muster, I could at least suggest something about this state of consciousness through art. I allowed myself a modicum of physical involvement in the mark making process and discovered moments of meditational flow that allowed me to loosen up the tight control of my conscious mind. I could bypass some of my concerns about who I was trying to be. But I also decided that I needed to balance all this with a hint of rationality. I anchored the chaos in  recognisable shapes that point to metaphysical descriptions of the nature of reality. It means that a rational world view about past, present and future has also found its place in the work. It is nevertheless never fully spelled out and is entirely open to subjective interpretation. For instance, if people see commonalities with Extinction Rebellion, it was not something I was aware of a the time but am not opposed to seeing as part of the interpretation.

My ‘pointer’ towards an ambiguous aspect of reality is still as gross and tentative a representation as the ambiguity it’s trying to express. By not framing the work, I wanted to put the idea of a ‘window’ in question. I’ve tried to point to the individuality and tangibility of each of the sheets of paper I’ve been working on, as well the ambiguity of the boundaries of the work and its environment. Hopefully the work offers a small ‘opening’ into the realm of the inner self as it could appear when the individual nods off, the sense of self dissolves, and consciousness goes about its job of restructuring the matrix of the body and the world within.  But it’s also part and parcel of the context it appears within.

See all the three pieces in ‘Artwork’; ‘Abstract work 2018.