“Emotional Landscapes” at ARKA Gallery, Vilnius. Curated by Šelda Puķīte. 21.10.2023 — 17.12.2023

Laura Põld & Lou Sheppard, Sweeping the Sea + Large Oak + Strange House (2023), 3 channel video and installation commissioned for the exhibition “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene”.

Lyrics: folk poetry collected by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) from Viisu Village / Roosna-Alliku Manor, Järva County
Melody: folk song collected from Järva-Jaani Parish, Estonia

Choral arrangement: Sander Saarmets
Runosong research: Janika Oras, Andreas Kalkun, Taive Lõhmus (Estonian Literary Museum)

Performers: Sigrid Savi, Juss Heinsalu
Choral performance: Vikerlased
Conductor: Keio Soomelt

Camera: Albert Kerstna

Filmed at Aru-Lõuna Quarry, Lääne-Viru County, Estonia.

 

“This installation explores the many lives of quarries, the pits of earth that remain after the extraction of stone and minerals. Many timelines converge in the quarry: deep geological time, the ancient million-year-old histories of the formation of stone; the more modern history of mining, extraction, and wealth production; the recent abandonment of the quarries; and the new possible futures that take root as nature reasserts itself. The materials of the quarry also embed lives that are just as varied, from the ancient creatures whose fossils are literally embedded in stone, to the later ecologies displaced and disfigured by extraction, and the human lives responsible for that labor of displacement.

Põld and Sheppard  intertwine these timelines in their recreation of a quarry from recycled clay plaster. Their quarry transforms the traditional „pit“ instead into an amphitheatre, where multiple stories—and experiences—can be told. Polyphonic melodies, inspired by the Estonian folk song „Sweeping the Sea, Large Oak, Strange House“, resound through the cavernous rocks, as the sonorous voices of miners fill those spaces emptied by their labor. As they sing distinctive call-and-response melodies of Estonian runic singing, the installation echoes a similar call-and-response between the triangular relation of the video displays. The artists beckon viewers into the future of the abandoned mine, to contemplate what abundance the quarry might nourish, what communities might form and take shape in the interstices, when these stony landscapes no longer maintain value within a cycle of wealth production.” – Bart Pushaw

 

Photos by Laurynas Skeisgiela

Group exhibition at PAL Project, Paris.

Curated by Andy Rankin.

14.10. – 10.11.2023

Ring Ring Ring is an exhibition where there is nothing to see, but everything to hear. This experimental format brings together 100 artists and 100 phones, but no artworks are displayed in PAL Project. The phones ring randomly, allowing visitors to listen to descriptions of the dedicated artworks. The text was written by curator Andy Rankin and read by a synthesized voice using recordings of artist Carla Adra’s voice. After listening to the recording, one simply needs to press a specific key on the phone to be connected with the gallery owners for the acquisition of the artwork or its description. The audio file is a duplicable multiple until the moment the phone stops ringing, which happens as soon as the artwork is sold. To encourage a listening time conducive to stimulating the imagination, the artwork’s title or the name of the artist who created it is not revealed. This uncertainty is heightened by the fact that it is impossible to know when the phone will ring, or even if it will ring again. This unique listening experience with inevitably incomplete descriptions gives rise to a curious sense of urgency. It prompts the question of what we truly retain from a work of art: is it what we see, what we are told, or what is recounted to us? This exhibition is an exploration of the spread of rumors and the birth of legends. Ring Ring Ring is an exhibition where there is nothing to see, but everything to imagine.

Ring Ring Ring was made possible thanks to the valuable technical and creative support from Telerys Communication.

List of featured artists: Zarouhie Abdalian – Carla Adra – Haseeb Ahmed – Cesar Akli Kaci – Emii Alrai – Xavier Antin – Dana-Fiona Armour – Sasha Auerbakh – Adam Bateman – Alexandre Bavard – Cécile Beau – Yoan Beliard – Louise Belin – Théophile Blandet – Max Blotas – Celia Boulesteix – Max Brück – Gillian Brett – Stéphanie Brossard – Nathan Carême – Leonel Castañeda Galeano – Charlotte Charbonnel – Celia Coette – Caroline Corbasson – Marlon de Azambuja – Georgia Dickie – Marcin Dudek – Riley Duncan – Morgane Ely – Frederik Exner – Antonio Fernández Alvira – Arthur Francietta – Julia Gault – Tania Gheerbrant – Marina Glez. Guerreiro – Jules Goliath – Arthur Golyakov – Romeo Gómez López – Laura Gozlan – Collectif Grapain – Ruiji Han – Kim Hankyul – Jingfang Hao – Tristan Higginbotham – Anders Holen – Ádám Horváth – Silas Inoue – Ellande Jaureguiberry – Gvantsa Jishkariani – Ilya Kabakov – Paul Kajander – On Kawara – Monika Emmanuelle Kazi – Koen Kloosterhuis – Alfons Knogl – Lennart Lahuis – André Magaña – Jenine Marsh – Josep Maynou – Matisse Mesnil – Maya Minder – Anita Molinero – Mikelis Murnieks – Louise Mutrel – Naomi Nakazato – Yosi Negrín – Lee Nevo – Matthias Odin – Francesco Pacelli – Angyvir Padilla – Emma Passera – Jonathan Pêpe – Nelson Pernisco – Emma Pidré – Valentina Pini – Laura Põld – Manon Pretto – Yoel Pytowski – Andy Rankin – Antoine Renard – Vivien Roubaud – Kévin Rouillard – Sofía Salazar Rosales – Janne Schimmel – Kristina Sedlerova Villanen – Ding Shiwei – Dennis Sierig – Paola Siri Renard – Anna Solal – Jura Shust – Laurence Sturla – Shinuk Suh – Katinka Theis – Sarah Valente – Evita Vasiljeva – Capucine Vever – Romain Vicari – Iolo Walker – Xolo cuintle

An artistic dialogue with the ceramic artworks of Luule Kormašova (b. 1935 in Tallinn), part of the exhibition “To Mold, to Hold. Currents in Estonian Ceramics”, curated by Kati Saarits, Raili Keiv and Laura Põld. ARS project space, Tallinn. 19.08. – 15.09.2023.

Luule Kormašova, Rye (Rukis), 1974. Stoneware. Estonian Artists’ Association’s art collection

Luule Kormašova, Daisies (Karikakrad), 1974. Stoneware. Estonian Artists’ Association’s art collection

Laura Põld, Thorns, twigs, icicles, caves, 2023 (Series). Earthenware

Luule Kormašova, decorative tile, 1971. Stoneware. Estonian Artists’ Association’s art collection

 

Photos by Albert Kerstna

Solo presentation at the viennacontemporary Art Fair 2023, section Zone1, curated by Francesca Gavin. Represented by Kogo gallery.

Ways of Being: Speculative Scenes Regarding Laura Põld’s Installation for viennacontemporary 2023

Text by Gary Markle

Photos by Simon Veres and Albert Kerstna

 

Scene One – Belonging

July 2023. Climate-crisis summer. She is at a lake in the mountains of Upper Austria, about to take a swim. She enters the deep cold water. After some time, her body begins to relax visibly. In water, She can move and glide in a way not possible on dry land. She lifts her gaze from the lake’s depth to the peaks of the mountains and the verdant meadows connecting them. From the water, She sees the mountains, the trees, the raspberry brambles and their thorns, and light, light, light. And claims a state of belonging in this (foreign) land. In this place, She recognizes the origins of her recent imaginings. Here, in this lake encircled by mountains, She finds her work’s meaning. Earlier, in her studio in Tallinn, she created layer-by-layer, more-than-human canvases made of green-hued bioplastic. She sees these skins as sheets of algae composed of wool and broken eggshells, among other things—a floating island to support her ideas. Algae is a perfect metaphor for the worlding involved here, for it belongs to a material classification that is not fixed; The kingdom Protist to which algae is assigned is a catchall category for a range of organisms best defined by what they are not.

Scene Two – The Artist’s Gaze

It is nighttime in the early autumn of 2022. She is at an artist residency in rural Estonia. A gentle snow is falling, adding a hush to the world. She works in the collective studio while others sleep. She stands with hands on hips on the seat of a simple wooden chair in semi-darkness, silhouetted by warm light, her eyes fixed on an incomplete textile work lying on a large table in front of her. She maintains this mountain-like pose for a very, very long time. She pulls ideas from some deep inner source, like water from a dark well. From these ideas, She makes artifacts that are soothing and perplexing at the same time, asking viewers to participate in questioning, not what these creative works do but what the viewer would do with them. She is not the work; She is giving body and voice to the work.

Scene Three – Caregiver/Artmaker

She is in the communal kitchen of the artist’s residency. She is making a cake for those assembled. For now, it is her space. They can help with the making but are wise to avoid getting in her way when She cares for them and others. She embodies the roles of both nourisher and pragmatist in the creation of this assemblage. To make it well, She needs equal measures of care and practicality. She employs the same methodology in her kitchen and studio. She follows no receipt book. Later in Austria, at the Academy of Ceramics Gmunden, She will concoct luxurious morsels in the form of   owing objects resembling claws, tusks, stems, and branches —and ceramic confections of thorns and hands with metallic glazes that sensually protect and imprison cylindrical clay members. When this unusual cake is ready, She will invite you to her installation/table to g(r)aze on wool and clay and bioplastic; then, you will realize the magic of the flavour is not in the ingredients themselves but in the skill of her combinations. Will She offer another piece of this intoxicating delicacy later in Vienna?

Scene Four – Of Smoke and Ash

It is late in the evening in mid-November of 2022. She is huddled, with the other art residents, in a traditional smoke sauna in rural Estonia. Flames from a wood fire dance shadows on the rough wood interior, blackened with soot. Outside, a light coating of snow is on the ground, and the pond for cooling off grows a thin skin of ice. In the intense heat of the sauna, the initiates, already familiar with each other’s naked bodies, are asked to spread their legs and whip between them with a bundle of herbs. Next, to cover themselves with ash and honey from head to toe. They will perform a ritual of becoming tree-like, seeking nourishment from the earth, and moving this energy into the sky through branches of what is yet to come, of what might be. The learning is completed by entering ice-cold water, cleansing spirit, mind and body. She will take this teaching to the lake and the mountains of Austria.

Scene Five – Ways of Being

It is September 2023 at the viennacontemporary Art Fair. The viewer enters the installation space to examine the final labours of her recent practice, laid bare before them. Telling tales of mountains, lakes, the fields. They cannot fix their gaze on one still image; it is a complex story they are invited to unfold, a narrative to which they must contribute to complete and consume through ways of being.

There is nothing easy about making Art.

“Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. Curated by Linda Kaljundi, Eha Komissarov, Ulrike Plath, Bart Pushaw and Tiiu Saadoja.

“This installation explores the many lives of quarries, the pits of earth that remain after the extraction of stone and minerals. Many timelines converge in the quarry: deep geological time, the ancient million-year-old histories of the formation of stone; the more modern history of mining, extraction, and wealth production; the recent abandonment of the quarries; and the new possible futures that take root as nature reasserts itself. The materials of the quarry also embed lives that are just as varied, from the ancient creatures whose fossils are literally embedded in stone, to the later ecologies displaced and disfigured by extraction, and the human lives responsible for that labor of displacement.

Põld and Sheppard  intertwine these timelines in their recreation of a quarry from recycled clay plaster. Their quarry transforms the traditional „pit“ instead into an amphitheatre, where multiple stories—and experiences—can be told. Polyphonic melodies, inspired by the Estonian folk song „Sweeping the Sea, Large Oak, Strange House“, resound through the cavernous rocks, as the sonorous voices of miners fill those spaces emptied by their labor. As they sing distinctive call-and-response melodies of Estonian runic singing, the installation echoes a similar call-and-response between the triangular relation of the video displays. The artists beckon viewers into the future of the abandoned mine, to contemplate what abundance the quarry might nourish, what communities might form and take shape in the interstices, when these stony landscapes no longer maintain value within a cycle of wealth production.” – Bart Pushaw

 

Photos by Stanislav Stepashko and Joosep Kivimäe

Laura Põld & Lou Sheppard, Sweeping the Sea + Large Oak + Strange House (2023), 3 channel video and installation commissioned for the exhibition “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene”.

Lyrics: folk poetry collected by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) from Viisu Village / Roosna-Alliku Manor, Järva County
Melody: folk song collected from Järva-Jaani Parish, Estonia

Choral arrangement: Sander Saarmets
Runosong research: Janika Oras, Andreas Kalkun, Taive Lõhmus (Estonian Literary Museum)

Performers: Sigrid Savi, Juss Heinsalu
Choral performance: Vikerlased
Conductor: Keio Soomelt

Camera: Albert Kerstna

Filmed at Aru-Lõuna Quarry, Lääne-Viru County, Estonia.

Solo presentation at Art Brussels 2023 (Discovery section). Curated by Šelda Puķīte and Kogo Gallery (Tartu)

“This work can be seen as a homage to the long history of textile-making, with weaving practices believed to date back as far as 19,000 BCE—and evidence of fibre use reaching even earlier, to around 35,000 BCE. The role of textiles became especially significant during the Ice Age, when dramatic shifts in climate pushed humans to adapt to colder environments. They developed bone needles, crafted warmer and more fitted clothing, and migrated out of Africa. In Estonia, traces of ancient glacial movements remain visible in the varied erratic boulders scattered across the landscape. These forms have become a recurring motif in Põld’s recent textile works—just as subterranean matter features prominently in her ceramic sculptures. Põld’s engagement with fibre and thread feels quietly radical. Her turn toward slowness, tactility, and elemental knowledge evokes an enduring human capacity for care and self-reliance—an alternative to the extractive systems of fast fashion and industrial overproduction that continue to devastate communities and ecosystems alike” – Šelda Puķīte

Performances by Sigrid Savi.

Photos by Lucie Deluz and Albert Kerstna.

Solo exhibition “Translating and Co-labouring” at (AV17) Gallery, Vilnius. 26.01.-02.03.2023

Photos by Evgenia Levin

(AV17) Gallery, Vilnius. 26.01.-02.03.2023

The body of work by Laura Põld, Translating and Co-labouring, is in the business of creating impossible spaces and forms in textile and, to a lesser extent, also clay. These do not come with grand lofty visions but instead, are grounded open-ended objects, reliant on repetition and labour—the sturdy base of the nitty-gritty we all create to make a life for ourselves and those around us.

In the two-part series Kassia, Põld makes visible the process of making and unmaking. Combining and unravelling threads, she also endows the viewer with two-fold vision. Despite the unfinished parts and loose threads, the viewer is compelled to construct an image, a whole, to finish it in their mind’s eye. At the same time, looking at the unravelling pieces, the image disintegrates into material, drawing the viewer’s attention to the source, the components.

Weaving and unravelling go hand-in-hand, one does not exist without the other, whether the latter is intentional or just plainly inevitable. I am reminded of the often-told story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, fending off new suitors by telling them she will only consider them after she is finished weaving a shroud for her husband—an item she wove during the day and unravelled again at night. In her book Thread Ripper, Amalie Smith writes: “What is Penelope weaving? It never comes together to form an image. Penelope by day: assembling an image. Penelope by night: dismantling an image into its physical components.”

Historically, the creation of textiles has been connected to reproduction and reinforcing certain gender roles; for example, textiles have played in important part in marriage rituals. There was an old Baltic Finnic wedding tradition, where the bride presented the relatives of the groom with gifts or veimed to ensure good relations with her husband and his family. Most often, veimed included various textiles and garments, made by the future bride together with other girls from her village. This was an extensive task that needed contribution and labour from many.

Yet, textile has always been vital to the survival and flourishing of all members across society—it is just that often the process of labouring has been left to those less valued. The process of labour also means translating between the hand and the mind and the material but equally so between an individual body and the social body. Weaving is production—marks work, marks morality, marks what is good and what is bad. Weaving is projection—marks status, marks possibilities, marks the past and the future. Põld’s larger works, Fingers Braiding Gold and From a Sister, From a Mother, From a Foremother further zoom into the process of making, revealing the material and the possible structures it can be shaped into. The work later combines folk motifs and tools of crafting with loosely hanging threads, but I can’t yet exactly tell whether the collage of surfaces and objects is an attempt to weave a somewhat coherent timeline or just the opposite, to show the rips and loose seams in the fabric of the narrative of time.

Whichever the case, textile has been present throughout human history—the industry of fabric is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stock-breeding, making cloth the original technology. Looking at archaeology’s bias against fabric, Kassia St Clair writes: “Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like Iron or Bronze, rather than Pottery or Flax. This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants. Technologies using perishable materials, such as wood and textiles may well have been more pivotal in the daily lives of the people who lived through them, but evidence of their existence has, for the most part, been absorbed back into the earth.”

Textile is the kind of technology that Ursula K. Le Guin writes about in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, discussing how stories are often constructed around action and heroic figures, while the more mundane but vital sustenance work remains unappreciated. Le Guin suggests that rather than viewing human evolution in terms of tools that can be used to stick, bash and kill, all kinds of vessels and containers—bags, baskets, pouches, rolled bark or leaves, nets woven from hair—used to gather and carry, provide us with other kinds of stories that really make a difference. Although complex and demanding, textile is rarely the kind of technology that the hero of the story reaches for in his adventures. Such objects are not hard, pointed or sharp—not preferred tools for the singular moment of heroic killing. Instead, the making is repetitive, sometimes menial. So, co-labouring both with other people but also with the material itself could provide less alienating and non-atomised forms of work, just as communal singing and spinning have historically close ties—a form of imagining, translating between the mind and the world.

 

Text by Keiu Krikmann

Photos by Evgenia Levin