It was early spring we landed on Korpo Island in the Archipelago Sea. At that time ice was leaving its’ shores and snow melting away, unveiling granite terrain softened by rich mosses and lush forests. As residents of AARK (Archipelago Art Residency in Korpo), we spend much of our time watching passing ships and exploring surroundings, searching for evidence of an islandness. We found it, by surprise in a dense forest, which seemed to us as a gallery without borders – inspiring with capacious diverse ideas: insularity and connectedness, constancy and movement, self-sufficient and dependent.

 

Lucky chance induced us to work in a little forest area alongside the harbor there was no man’s garden. We rendered it with a sense of a gallery, where objects emanate from the background, but appears in the foreground, distinguishing here and there. After cleaning an area we piled up a bunch of material to work with: cut trees and twigs, coal, soil, and some clay. Intimate touch with the environment exposed a vague boundary between nature and culture. Objects, we installed in the area are meant to be a guide to their environment.