Saaramaria Kariranta
I combine traditional sculptural techniques with modern technologies, often with everyday objects that can be found around us. In my recent work, I question human practices as part of society. Although what I do relates to global social issues, I do not approach them empirically, but rather by freely creating narratives between the information offered to us by the media and those that we get through science-based researches.
Nowadays, there is a lot of information about the world around us. We have all the knowledge about environmental problems and climate changes, thanks to research and the media. Although we know that our lifestyles and consumer habits cause this crisis, we still do not change our behavior. Is all this knowledge in a way unrelated to the way in which we can experience life?
In Finnish, the word "understand" says "käsittää" and the word "kasi" means hand. If you literally translate the word "understanding" from Finnish into English it means "take in your hand and you will understand." I like this connotation of the Finnish word "käsittää" because as a sculptor I work with hands and through my work I try to understand what happens in the world around us. Art provokes different senses. Since I believe that there is a gap between our theoretical knowledge and our behavior, I think that art can be a part of the bridge between these two poles. Our existence is not only intellectual and verbal communication is not the only way to understand something. And what comes from nature (forests, wetlands, rivers, whole ecosystems) does not communicate verbally and is not based on theories. We need to understand the existence by our senses, not the intellect. Here, in Sirogojno I continued the work that I started in Serbia 'hiding the live plants with gold and trying to create bloody sail ships from plastic bags. I've already created "plastic bags that breathe".
