Sculptor Kirsi Kaulanen works with a site-specific approach, navigating between public and free art and playing with scale. With her roots in Äkäslompolo, Lapland, everything in her art can be traced back to nature, which is in us and outside us. It involves a deep concern for the loss of biodiversity, but it is also about beauty, awe and our shared destiny. Awarded with both the Finland Prize and the Pro -Finlandia medal, she has presented her works in numerous group and solo exhibitions, most recently at group exhibitions in the Oulu Art Museum and the Kerava Art Museum in 2022-2023. Kaulanen, who has made dozens of public artworks, created in 2023 the official memorial for former President Mauno Koivisto called The Mediator for the Little Parliament Park in Helsinki.
My art deals with the place of humans in nature and as a part of nature. The forms of my sculptures grow from details and ornaments that intertwine with each other. Their expression draws from the world of plants, the communication between the roots of different plants. I have especially chosen to use endangered plants as models for my sculptures, to remind us of the beauty, temporality and vulnerability of life.
The ornamentation of many of my works is based on the root patterns of endangered plants. Roots fascinate me. They are the writing of the earth, channels of information. My works make up sculptural landscapes that pull the viewer into their internal world, into a whirl of layered details. I feel that as I walk in forests and fells the forms of nature are recorded in my body’s memory, from where they turn, through the perception of my hands, into sculptures. The sculptures spreading out on walls, ceilings and floors are like living organisms or unknown universes.
I sculpt, for example, metal, wood, light and space. As a material, steel allows me to combine a sensitive and fragile language of form with a monumental scale. I aim to sculpt steel into something soft, delicate and ethereal. Steel can draw my forms with an unusual lightness that enables me to minimize the use of material. My sculptures are three-dimensional drawings on light, which they shape as shadows and reflections in a space.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration is an important part of my practice. In the installation Mimesis, we developed ideas of musical sculptures together with percussionist Teho Majamäki and composer Lauri Porra. The collaboration gave birth to flowing and spiraling forms, which we elevated into soloists in Majamäki’s meditative soundscape. The piece continues as a dance-based work of media art by Raimo Uunila. Lighting designer Sara Leino has worked together with me to illuminate my works.I endeavor to affect with my art the way people see and look at things. Through form, I wish to convey a similar sense of wonder that arises from looking at the horizon at sea, or when you feel like you are disappearing in the landscape at the top of a fell or sinking in the infinity of a starry sky.