Sari Palosaari on time and shorelines as inspiration

As a part of the international residency program of the Finnish Cultural Foundation, visual artist Sari Palosaari has spent the past three months in residency with our friends at Triangle Arts Association. We wanted to know more about her and her time in New York, so we sent over a few questions for her to answer.

Can you tell us more about yourself and your artistic practice?

“I am a visual artist based in Helsinki. I create sculpture installations using a variety of materials, from industrial metal alloys to rocks, hay, and beeswax. The often site-responsive works can include temporal processes or performative elements. My methods of working stem from construction techniques and architecture. In addition to that, I engage in tentative exploration of the materials and their effect on one another or their intrinsic or possible transformation through different forces.”

“My work starts from my everyday surroundings—the environment in which I live or the contexts within which I am working—and expands toward a planetary scale of thought. After exploring the often painfully haunting references, processes, and production methods of the materials, I try to let go and work fiercely toward the otherworldly and speculative field. I work in mutual power with the matter, cooperating with its agencies rather than pushing its limits, which, I think, is the key to the magic. I also work spatially, cultivating relationships and connections between the architectural surroundings and the human bodies within the material bodies of the works. I often think about the relations between subject-objects as a dance with each other, but a dance without determined choreography—just bodies in motion in mutual space.”

What inspires you in your art?

“The questions I work with relate to how time is entangled with materials, constructions, and conceptions. I think of all the materials non-hierarchically extracted from the resources of this planet and produced by human or nonhuman forces to the form they take in the present time. I am interested in how things accumulate, stabilize, harden, and solidify under the pressure of history. As much, if not more, I want to explore the forces and energies that trigger motion, destabilization, and transformation. I’m also interested in things of the past and future that come to haunt us.”

What has been inspiring you here in New York?

“Here in New York, I have noticed how much I am drawn to shorelines. In fact, at home, I live by the sea, and so do those of my childhood family who are still here. We all live in a similar way, with glazed balconies facing a body of water. And we all ended up living in these conditions after the sudden deaths of my younger brother and father, shortly apart. So now it’s just us ladies living by big waters and skies. I think I am drawn to the shorelines not only for the breathing space and the perspective they allow but also because of the tangibility of time, the processes of life and death, and the transformations that are so evident there. These are also human-haunted landscapes that carry the weight and litter of the history of the modern era.

The East River and Hudson River Estuary, with a history as the greatest harbor in the world, resemble, although different in scale, the Arctic Bothnia Bay, where my mother lives, situated between two paper factories and a steel factory, as well as Vuosaari, where I live, with its dump and the harbor of Helsinki. They serve as witnesses and reveal the history in a tangible, material, and devastating way. It is a history of death and loss of nature.”

“But what about life? So, I am looking for the counterforces, for the forces that make a difference. What draws one to these shores? Here in New York, the shores have bathed me with the burning sun on my skin (through October to December, like every second day!), warming it up and changing the structure of its cells. The swirling wind has made my eyes, dried by heating and pollution, water. The waves have caught my stomach and the stomachs of others on the ferry, making us laugh a laughter that rises carried by the relentless beat of the abdominals that you cannot resist, bouncing and making the laughter come out aloud. I have enjoyed the hay turning golden in the sun and looking for relics of the forces of nature affecting the human-haunted. And so many other experiences that make you one with nature, which is within you, and that is a playful place to dwell.”

What have you been working on while in residency here in New York?

“I have been reflecting on the new branch of work that I exhibited at the gallery Sculptor while already here in New York - the time schedules overlapped due to the pandemic aftermath. New York has turned out to be such a fruitful arena for exploring and researching the continuation of the line of work that I started this year. I have especially been looking into the works ‘Run Root Reroute’ and ‘Sun Absorbed’ through the idea of shorelines. Additionally, the way I executed the installation ‘Loose Configurations’ at the Mänttä Art Festival speaks to these experiences.

I have explored the Rockaway, Coney Island, Staten Island, and East River shores. I have been photographing the very visible infrastructures of the city and collecting objects that are affected by natural forces, some of which are returning to their origins and some of which I will save for possible use in new works. I have been reading, drawing, and creating contextual studio installations, object assemblages, and drawings. I’ve had conversations and even small rehearsals with other artists and curators. I’ve also visited various exhibitions and performance events.”

Speaking of New York, what are your reflections on your time here so far? Have these shifted from your initial expectations?

“Being in NYC for the first time, I indulged myself to get to know the city. I’ve done a lot of hiking and ended up in unexpected situations and places where I would not have found myself otherwise. The culture of joining in and showing up to events is very fluent here, for example, remote locations are no obstacle, people show up and seize the moment. There is a lot of energy in that, just in experiencing things. In Manhattan, the art history is very much woven into the fabric of the city. Through art exhibitions in major museums, etc., I could experience the joy and excitement of the modern city evolving.

I felt it especially strongly through Ed Ruscha’s early works at MoMA – they embodied the atmosphere of jazz, honking cars, colored lights, and the fiction in all of that so intensively. From today’s perspective, it felt so heartbreaking. In many places in Manhattan, it feels like the city is still living from and through that retro-future created through the art and entertainment industry in the 20th century. However, I have been happy to see some small steps of transformation, for example, some efforts to allow nature to occupy spaces at the shores of the city.”

“I am really thankful for the conditions offered to me here by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and The Finnish Cultural Institute, including the apartment, and the studio and program provided by Triangle Arts Association. I genuinely appreciate how Nova and the rest of the staff at the Triangle Arts Association studios exert themselves in taking care of the artists. I am also very grateful for the opportunity to live and work here both on my own and to have my family here for a period of time. It has been a great chance to embrace my artist self fully, but it was also essential to me that my family could come here to share all of this with me. It was also a fantastic opportunity for our child to learn a lot. She gave me a look at the city through TikTok and popular culture, as well as horror films, which was so much fun, too.”

How would you describe your residency experience here?

“I started by attuning to the place, making studio installations or a sort of contextual sculptures that I shared with the visitors as well. I initially struggled with the empty studio and its dual function as both a making and presenting space, which is not the usual case in my work. I surprised myself by deciding to just let everything come to me and live at ease with it. So, I joined everything possible offered through the program and even organized some programs myself. I learned that it can be fruitful to let others enter the process and that it can provide a lot of energy as well. What I can take back home from that experience is that I can be more aware of how to divide my time between focused work and the input of encounters with others.”

What is next for you after New York?

“Well, here in New York, I am still participating in a brick-building event where we make bricks collected here from the Lenapehoking soil. I am very much looking forward to that. I am also organizing an event in cooperation with Triangle and FCINY, where we have invited two conservators, along with some artists and other professionals, for a visit. We will discuss topics I have drawn from my practice and a book that has influenced me. When I get back home, I am about to hand over the work ‘Sun absorbed’ to the collection of Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art. Concerning conservation, I have to think about how I want time to be stilled or deferred for the piece that has been a living thing with patina and oxidation so far.”

“Right after New Year, I have a couple of meetings with Aalto University architecture students, and I will also be working on a jury for a public art competition. Both of these are exciting platforms to observe what’s going on in the field. I also have some cooperation plans that relate to slow spaces and material reading, but they are in too early stages to talk more about. Most of all, I will start working on a set of new works I have been sketching out here. But first, I will spend a lovely Christmas and New Year with my family and friends.”

Text: Nela Silfverberg