IKUISUUS HETKESSÄ – ETERNITY IN A MOMENT

Welcome to the opening reception for the exhibitions of Tue January 27th, 5-7 p.m.

As an artist, I feel that life constantly offers – or rather pushes – interesting topics and phenomena that I feel like tackling and exploring. The greatest source of inspiration is nature, towards which I have a living love affair and connection and into whose embrace I have a great need to reach. I study stones, cliffs, mountains, trees, plants and mosses with great passion. Their shapes and scents settle in me, and through them filter into parts of my works.

In this exhibition, nature acts as a metaphor for the cycle of life, birth, death and rebirth. Withering flowers and plants wrinkle and dry like human skin, I find them beautiful and I observe with interest how matter changes in both us humans and plants.

The theme of the exhibition also considers time, the time between life and death. Or between death and life. In nature, death is a state of rest, when plants die and rot, they also nourish the seed that awaits the next spring underground.

In the fall, the caterpillar hatches from a butterfly egg and weaves a cocoon, a vehicle that will carry it until the following spring, then it hatches and flies towards the light. For humans, I made cocoons out of clay, urns that emerge from the earth and carry the human being with them towards a great mystery.

Hannamaija Heiska (M.A.) is a ceramic artist and principal of a an art school who lives in Raseborg. Heiska mainly uses recycled clay and porcelain in her works, to which pigments or paper have been added, for example. Heiska is a ceramic artisan by training and graduated with a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design in 2008. In addition to her studies in art and education, Heiska has completed, among other things, solution-focused art therapy instructor studies.

Heiska's central source of inspiration is the cycle of nature and the larger scale of space, as well as the changes brought about by time, in which the earthly and the cosmic enter into dialogue. The perspective of the works is built on the realization of man's vanishingly small part of this whole and at the same time the experience in which life appears larger than itself.

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Above left from the work Song for Dying Garden 2025. Recycled and glazed black clay and above right Urn, paper clay.