Henri Tuominen
2023, Oil painting
The artwork is exhibited in the Kuva/Tila gallery on the 1st floor of the Mylly building.
Description
The starting point for my degree project is personal. In the past, I have wanted my works to be connected to a current social theme. Now, I am trying to approach painting from a new perspective, where the themes emerge from my own life. One of the inspirations for my recent works has been the Finnish word kuolinpesä, which in English means ‘legal estate’, but in Finnish is composed of the words kuolema (‘death’) and pesä (‘nest’). The associations related to these words move in different directions: death is associated with something unknown, emptiness, the end of everything – and nest with warmth, home, and safety.
I have recorded background material for my paintings in the front and back yards of a terraced house that used to belong to my parents, who passed away in the spring of 2022. The paintings’ topic is the garden, the intimate yard that has been turned into part of human culture by isolating it from nature, controlling it and transforming it into a place where nobody works or moves around anymore. However, my exhibition does not focus on the events leading up to my parents’ demise; instead, the works are abstract and expressive, and they deal with the themes of beginning, growth, end, and continuity in the small scale of everyday life.
About the artist
Artist Henri Tuominen was born in 1983 in Turku.