Artist Statement
My artistic practice moves between myth, material, and the living body. Working across painting, installation, drawing, and mixed media, I explore how cultural memory, folklore, and nature connection continues to shape the ways we understand gender, body, and our relationship with the mundane things.
My work grows from Finnish folk tradition and mythology. I draw from historical symbols, rituals, patterns, and visual languages that have traveled through generations in everyday objects, crafts, stories, and gestures. Rather than approaching folklore as something distant or nostalgic, I treat it as an active cultural layer that still quietly shapes contemporary behavior, language, and imagination. Through my work I bring these fragments of cultural memory into new contexts where they can be seen, questioned, and reimagined.
In Finnish folk belief, the human body, especially the female body, was once understood as a powerful interface between people and the forces of nature. The body could protect, transform, and open passages between worlds. These ideas continue to inform my practice. I am interested in how bodily knowledge, ritual gestures, and symbolic traditions once functioned as practical ways of relating to forests, animals, weather, and unseen forces.
Materiality is central to my process. I create visually intense environments where color, texture, and rhythm play an active role. My works often combine recycled materials, textiles, sand, fur, glitter, organic elements, and found objects. Surfaces are layered, dense, and sensorial. I approach materials with curiosity and play to guide the process.
Many of my works grow through repetition and accumulation. Shapes multiply, patterns expand, and materials gather into rhythmic structures that echo natural processes. These visual rhythms often contain coded elements. Morse-like pulses, symbolic patterns, and subtle visual signals appear within the compositions, reflecting my fascination with hidden communication systems, ways in which knowledge, beliefs, and stories have historically been transmitted through symbols and gestures rather than direct language.
–Minttu Saarinen
