Laura Ukkonen - Kone Foundation

I am a visual artsit and my technique of choice is drawing. My works are semi-fictional portraits, rooms and landscapes. They are created with coal, pencil and colour pencils, and spring from observations relating to my surroundings, myself and the people I meet. These observations act as a framework for examining emotional states. My personal experiences mix with an interest in the history of women. In fact, the (historical) gendering of emotions is an influential perspective in my work. What remnants are there in us of, for example, the 19th century woman for whom walking in the park alone was not socially acceptable? At the core, however, is the modern-day woman. Over and over again, I come across a conflict between sociability and feelings of an outsider and loneliness.

At the Saari Residence, I will be working on a series of drawings that will draw inspiration from the residency and from emotional states relating to it. My intention is to also discover a new visual world through techniques and materials already familiar to me. I will continue with an ongoing project of mine where the object under observation is the space outside the home, a space that is also extremely personal for us all in one way or another. I have previously depicted a city familiar to me. Now I have the opportunity to observe and react to an environment entirely strange to me. Writing is also a part of my creative process. I prepare by keeping a diary of my observations as well as by reading relevant literature.

I depict loneliness but simultaneously also the individual as part of different communities. Previously, focus has been on the notion of the home as a woman’s “own space”. The lead came from the enclosed private sphere of the bourgeois woman depicted in paintings by female impressionists in the late 19th century. Now, I am turning my attention to communities outside the home. The people in my pictures are somewhere in between adulthood and childhood, or carry with them the memory of becoming an adult. The broadening of horizons offers not only a sense of freedom but shapes an understanding of just how many norms the public sphere entails. We inevitably find ourselves entrenched in an artificially constructed value system, and yet it is also a community that we ourselves actively shape through our own actions.