Hanna Vahvaselkä :
Lahja (Gift)

Hanna Vahvaselkä: Lahja (Gift)

"In spring-winter 2023 I taught wood sculpture to future artists at LAB University of Applied Sciences in
Lappeenranta. I started the course by distributing wooden pieces to the students as gifts. The students were
allowed to use their own piece as part of a Memory-themed work created during the course. One of the
students had the idea to ask friends for more pieces of wood as a gift and make the Memory piece out of them.
Unfortunately, the student abandoned the idea. The idea stuck in my mind and when I tur ned fifty in October
of that year, I asked for wooden objects as gifts for artistic purposes. I received a huge number of different
wood-related items, from toothpicks to woodblocks and from a trunk to a book of poetry. My exhibition at
Galerie Katariina is the result of these gifts.

Over the past year, I have been working with these gifts in my studio. I have explored them by moving,
organising and documenting. Some of the gifts I have dismantled, some I have taken apart, some I have
combined with others in new ways. Instead of careful planning, I have “jumped on board with the wood and
gifts”, seeing what kind of meanings they make, when brought together. While working, I have tried to listen
carefully to the material. What to do with the meaningful branch that fell from a neighbour's favourite tree,
the boastful little man that a friend carved to me, or how to take a joke told in the doorway into the exhibition?
Some of the works are not completed until they are placed in the exhibition space, but all the gifts I have
received have been used in some form as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition is also part of my doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts , Uniarts Helsinki. My artistic
research focuses on memory objects and the intertwining of memory and material: what kind of memory does
wood as a material contain, what kind of memory does it transmit and what kind of memory does working with
wood evoke and bring out.

Thanks to Viola Nygård for the idea, friends and acquaintances for the gifts and Taike for supporting the work."

Hanna Vahvaselkä is a sculptor, living and working in Mikkeli, eastern Finland. At present she is also a doctoral
candidate at Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, Helsinki. Her material is wood, with which she has worked since
1999. In her work, wood is the material and the creator of visual appearance, and part of the conceptual
content; for example, as intergenerational meanings or questions arising from the forest ecology. Constantly
working with materials in material processes the will of wood, the language of wood, the speech of wood and
the memory of wood are at the centre of her works.