Alma Heikkilä, Cohesion, Hydrocarbons, Aspen, Search Engine, Language and the Others
Taking a close look at our relationship with matter, the work of Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne/Helsinki) focuses on the conditions of visibility of both the human and the nonhuman. In the work Things that are massively distributed in time and space, a series of large-scale vertical paintings are installed in a row. The paintings are surrounded by small objects of clay expanding into books, similar to networks of growing mushrooms. The scale of these large paintings invites us to drift through the abstract fields of the material states they portray, from vaporous luminescence to atmospheres of striking rays of light.
Taking inspiration from Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), her painting series addresses human complicity with its material surroundings, which are interwoven with human and nonhuman agents at play. In an age of mass media, non-visual events such as climate change remain underrepresented; hence, the dispute over the tools for visibility and the conditions for recognition of organisms is crucial. By including all material agents as co-authors in the captions of her works (such as pigments, or, water), Heikkilä recognizes the metabolism of the everyday, the states of transition of elements and their properties, the interwoven statuses of being and becoming.
The operation of scale is another relevant process at stake in Heikkilä's paintings. In this series the works Climate, Petroleum, Network, I, Biosphere, and Sun, she highlights the order in which things appear and the organization of reality. In choosing the close up scale of her paintings, the artist addresses both the molecular and macro levels of the biosphere, leaving an aerial quality that speaks to the unrepresentability of nature. The debate about the agency of the close-up view is also a subject for discussion for the scientific community, which questions the frontiers of the subject-object relation and its processes of mediation or instrumentalization. In the work of Heikkilä, the hierarchy of the sole gaze of the subject is at stake as a potential trigger for decision-making.MM
self-presentation:
Interactions within Mustarinda, a group of artists and researchers, have been very generative for me as an artist. The goal of Mustarinda is to advance ecological and cultural diversity. The main site for our explorations is our art and research center located next to an old-growth forest in Central Finland. In the center, we strive for post-fossil fuel operations. Under solar-powered light, we have had endless discussions about slime mold, mycelium, ecocriticism, object-oriented philosophy, post-fossil worlds, modern money, etc., with artists, philosophers, biologists, political economists, and others. Reflecting these discussions, my artworks are always tight collaborations between the tools, the materials, and me.
