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Cloth & Culture NOW
the artists - Silja Puranen, Finland
The importance of Finnish culture for
my work as a textile artist is literally fundamental. Apart from
my country or nationality, the time that I grew up and have lived
in is also a crucial factor in my national cultural identity.
My Finland and its culture are different from that of Finns who
are older or younger than I am. The Finland of my childhood and
youth had a small population, it was an insignificant, little-known,
cold country cut off from the rest of western Europe. To the
East and across the Gulf of Finland to the South we faced the
iron curtain, to the West was the sea, and to the North – the
wilderness. The Finnish language bore no resemblance to any commonly
spoken language. Our only closely kindred nation, Estonia, was
part of the Soviet Union, and, from our point of view, existed
in a different reality.
The Finland of my childhood was one of
the countries that lost the war, and was clearly less prosperous
than its western neighbours. My parents’ generation had lived through the post-war recession,
and had learned to make things for itself as a means of survival.
At that time, the start of the 1960s, the still commonly mastered
everyday skills, such as textile handicraft, produced significant
financial savings for most families, even in the middle-class urban
world. When housewives got together in their sewing circles, they
were not just there to drink coffee and gossip, it was also a social
framework for a collective survival strategy. The material scarcity
also strengthened emotional ties to objects in the home. I remember
some of the textiles in my childhood in minute detail, which had
been given their own individual names. The “Sofa blanket” gave
warmth and comfort. The history of the brutal-sounding “Vomit
blanket” used to sit on at picnics included a random bout
of travel sickness on a summer trip.
In my youth in the 70s and 80s, Finland
was still isolated because of its geographical position and the
European political situation of the day. On their tours the majority
of international rock stars also only got as far as Stockholm
at most. Crossing the Baltic for the sake of the meagre Finnish
audience did not make economic sense. Youth culture faithfully
imitated the trends in the Anglo-American rock world until the
turn of the 70s and 80s, when aggressively defiant Brit-punk
was rapidly transformed into a new wave in Finn-rock, which included
a specific youth sub-culture. In addition to a slightly toned-down
punk defiance, this included as essential features Finnish-language
lyrics, bands that came from outside the capital city Helsinki,
and a conscious ideal of nature conservation and peace, along with
the inclusion of Finnish folk tradition as part of the sub-culture’s
fashion. People especially drew on the textile tradition. Inkle
bands were a central part of our accessories, and we generally
made them ourselves – with varying degrees of success.
This climate, together with the shock of everything being ready-made
and plastic, that I experienced as an exchange student in the USA,
led to my choice of profession. I wanted to make something authentic
and meaningful: to learn to weave cloth myself. Mastering a manufacturing
process that was thought of as being industrial would correspond
in meaning to surviving on a desert island. Our national tradition
represented a lost wisdom, aboriginality and authenticity.
As an artist it has always been typical for me to work through
things until I have no more to say. My work is a constantly developing
and changing continuum. Having celebrated my high-school graduation
in a dress that was embroidered with traditional Karelian designs,
having learned folk weaves, and having already made all the traditional
bands and belts by the end of my first year of studies, folk textiles
were then submerged beneath the surface. I went through my original
interest, weaving, during my student years, and I have not returned
to it since to any considerable extent in my works, at least not
on a concrete level.
The mainstream in Finnish textile art
(and industrial art) has for decades taken the material aesthetic
and simplified pure-formed expression as its starting point.
It has only been the younger generation of recent years that
has begun more broadly to see the possibilities for other kinds
of approach. In my own art the tendency that accentuates a nature
and material aesthetic influenced me for a few years after my
studies, but I also worked this phase out of myself. Social concerns
and contemporary popular taste – whose
decorativeness diverges greatly from the official good taste of
the tradition in Finnish industrial art – have come into
my works via their motifs and via the recycled materials that I
use. In my current works Finnish culture is particularly visible
via the attitude to textiles that I had already adopted during
my childhood. On the conceptual level, in my works textiles represent
protection, refuge, warmth, survival and memory. Conversely, they
also represent the human need to decorate the everyday environment
and to manifest social identity.
I have always taken the complete liberty
to use influences that come from other cultures in my works,
as long as it was justified in terms of the contents of the works.
Generally, however, these influences are submerged by the work’s
other elements. One of the clearest examples of this could be
seen as being the series of works that I made at the beginning
of the 1990s Jatkuva
kasvu Continuous Growth. The background to this was a six-month
trip to Asia and Oceania, and the theme of the works was a critical
examination of the predominance of western culture. Even though
the forms of the works were borrowed directly from the form language
of these regions, the works were ostensibly 100% manifestations
of the nature aesthetic and purity of form of the Finnish mainstream.
My current works, in which I use ready-made textiles, also contain
influences from the textile tradition of other countries through
the materials that I use in them. These textiles that I have collected
from flea-markets are mainly old Finnish products. Their patterns
reflect popular taste and influences, which both the nation’s
people and its textile industry have absorbed from the world’s
fashions and trends.
The interaction between cultures is also evident in the social
themes in my works. When I deal with the relationships between
the individual and society, with ideals of beauty, with medicalisation
or the goal of complete control of life prevalent in contemporary
society, at the same time, I touch on the ever-more-rapid changes
taking place in Finnish society under pressure of global influences,
and on the increasing standardisation of culture that is accompanying
globalisation. The combination of traditional embroidery, which
is founded on the human use of time and skill, with a digitally
manipulated image transfer derived from new technology and a purchased
commodity or service also echoes the encounter between tradition
and global contemporary culture. The importance of textiles as
providers of protection and comfort or as means of demonstrating
social status and cultural belonging are, nevertheless, the same
regardless of the time or the culture.
When speaking about traditional textiles
and cultural influences, I am interested in where the boundary
of tradition is drawn. Are traditional textiles solely canonised
folk embroidery, inkle bands and laces – which to a large
extent, being dictated by technique and, being the result of
centuries of exchange of cultural influences, are in fact quite
similar in appearance in different cultures? Or does the textile
tradition also include the later folk handicraft, in which the
absorption of cultural influences occurs nowadays, using the
means of electronic communication, more direct, and happen more
quickly and more extensively? In both cases the influences have
been taken from something that is considered more refined and
more valuable. As the starting point for my own works, I am not
nowadays really interested in the canonised folk tradition. Instead,
the kitschy longing for romantic beauty to the point of banality
found in popular taste and in contemporary folk handicraft provides
a fertile motivation for my works.
FINLAND
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