5.1–20.1.2019

Matti Hyvönen, Celeen Mahe

Project Room

Matti Hyvönen, Celeen Mahe

Matti Hyvönen:

In the beginning the Earth was formless and void, and the spirit of God hovered upon the waters. If there was nothing yet, what was the water? The void is conceptualized as at least something -- not as a vacuum, as in modern physics -- from which to create by separating.

Besides, now they say there’s all sorts of energetic mess in the vacuum as well!

When Satan escaped the gate of Hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost, He went into the Void, and there He was pushed around by the formless cloudlike raw elements, like a ship in a storm. From this stormy sea of primordial materia all things condense when they are created and gain form.

The emergence of forms The emergence of worms

It’s funny how we talk about nature as another place where we can go to, like an amusement park. I “go to the nature” quite rarely, and when I do, I usually take something from there with me: a result, a piece of evidence, a perception. I have a vivid memory of the nature experience, though. It’s full of complex features in beautiful colours and forms that explode at me from every direction at once. It is fetishist, a fantasy.

The self is individual but also an ecosystem. Is it one thing, or a loose group of different things coming and going? Objects with dissolving boundaries, condensations in a field, density distributions. Some of my pictures are like piles of decomposing garbage where it’s difficult to tell where one thing ends and another begins.

Adam also took part in creation, as God presented all the animals for him to name. For something to become real, it has to be recognized as what it is, and that form must have been internally in the mind already.

Matti Hyvönen, born 1989, Kerava painter, programmer, artist www.mattihyvonen.fi

Celeen Mahe:

Doubt is an important part of making. Not knowing. Not resolving. The challenge of accepting a form. Trying to find an image. Where to begin? Where to end? The act of drawing is a way to see some form of potential. The act of making a sculpture is an attempt at creating something physical and present, something that might potentially enliven a sense of curiosity.

Celeen Mahe (born 1987, Galway, Ireland) lives and works in Helsinki. Her work lies somewhere between sculpture, printmaking, painting, and installation. Mahé has exhibited her work at IMPACT 10 International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference (2018) Kiilto Group Family Collection, Tampere, Finland(2017), Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm (2016) FOIL Ormston House, Limerick, Ireland (2015), Now Wakes the Sea, Cork, Ireland (2015). She recieved a BFA from Limerick School of Art and Design in Sculpture (2014).

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