Children of Compost, artistic research and production

My great grandmother Martta Pellavavirta was a “torppari” farmer. With her husband they turned a small forest into a field, in the course of 5 years, with only the force of their bodies and the help of a horse. There in Jämsä, Keski-Suomi, they built their home, and everything inside, with the wood of the surrounding pine trees. They grew rye and produced terva, but Martta also grew and weaved the most beautiful linen, rough and full of raw chunks of linen straws. I want to tell Martta’s stories, the weave of her textile language, but also the stories of other women in my family and their craft: Paula, Francoise, Yvette… I want to portray them through the materiality that they created, and that created them. Portraits in the shape of sculptures and images, with materials compiled from their homes, diaries, photos, drawings, objects, crafts. The ensemble will consist of a series of sculptures, and a publication, in addition to producing a body of research. Children of Compost is an exploration of the shared kind and material world as humus, where all the bodies and objects are considered as agents of the fecund humus at different states of growth and decomposition. An attempt to shaping the future with an eco-feminist perspective on past lives.

The project « Children of Compost" has taken the shape of trips to residencies in rural Finland, France and Italy, to former family farms in Jämsä and Normandy, where I collected materials. Between these excursions were periods of intensive creation time in the studio and creating exhibitions.
The collecting of materials, wether concrete farm items (traditional tools, farm products and agrarian artefacts) or cultural heritage (gardening diaries, essays by archeologists, books on handcraft techniques, stories heard from my grandfather) has been a fruitful inspiration to create new sculptures and photography works.
Children of Compost project has been a tool for apprehending material and cultural heritage in new ways, and further than that, also a body-mind language building tool: how to translate and express physicality of an eco-system.
The series of works created during this project will be presented at LUSTO Museum in Punkaharju in May 2024 and at Titanik Gallery in Turku in August 2024.