Gothic Art in Spotlight: Uncanny insect statues

I haven't seen goth-y art lately, and that is the main reason why I haven't posted for a while. These sculptures I am now introducing are not that goth either, but they did appeal to my taste.

I saw these works in an exhibition at Gallery Gumbostrand Konst & Form. They are made by Kristian Venäläinen. His works are often sculptures, but his technique varies a lot.

These statues resemble a dragonfly, who for some reason is digging itself into the groud. They are odd, and most people do not like insects that much. Insects are thought to look a bit too alien, I guess.

Resembling an insect is not the most off-putting quality of these sculptures. The unnerving part is that if they are insects, there is something wrong with their structure. The wings seem to be pointing the wrong way.

Especially in this large sculpture the form is uncanny. The wooden wings are huge and spiky. And to me it looks like they are pointing to the wrong direction. But maybe it's just me?

What do you think? I think the way the wooden part is attached is very intriguing. It looks a bit like a helmet, doesn't it?

Venäläinen says he is inspired by the randomness of nature and that is very visible in these works. Their names are Evo as in the word evolution,  Otus and Olio (both can be translated as 'a creature') or Elo which means 'to live' or 'living'.  There were several statues, so their full names were Evo IV, and so on.

In this photo I used a random person as a measuring stick for the statues.

The smaller sculptures are constructed of metal and black clay. The big ones are made of some other clay for which I do not know the translation. But its consistancy is suitable for making huge objects.

The next post will be out in two weeks and it will feature another statue I saw on my vacation. It's not necessarily goth but it certainly is a bit odd.

Gothic Art in Spotlight: grotesque installations

I haven't posted for a while because this month has been very busy for me. I am going to move to a new apartment by the end of the month and today I am going to get my eyes operated. In the future I shan't be needing glasses to be able to see things around me! Obviously, I am rather excited (and agitated) about it. Hopefully everything goes alright! But now, to art:

A week ago I visited Tampere, my old university city, and spent one afternoon looking art. I encountered the grotesque installations and sculptures at an art gallery called Galleria Saskia. The exhibition is free, open daily and you can see it until the end of this month. 

The exhibition features two Finnish artists, Heli Ryhänen and Anne Meskanen-Barman. These both ladies have made a substantial career and the all the sculptures in the exhibition give the viewer an uncanny feeling.

Regardless of the whole exhibition being intriguing, I shall concentrate on only one installation by Meskanen-Barman: High Tea (2017). The installation consists of a table with food and teacups on it, an armchair and a lamp. When one enters the room, it looks quite harmless. But as one walks nearer, one sees that the high tea is not that delicious-looking.

The interpretation of this work is ambiguous. Therefore, it works as a reflector for the viewer. How do we react when a face is poking out from a sophisticated teacup? 

The faces in the teacups resemble the way one sees one's reflection of a teacup when one is about to have a sip. On the other hand, one seldom looks that agonized when one is enjoying high tea...

And how about those delicious little cakes? If one looks closely, one notices that the surface looks like a human nipple. How to interpret that? Is the installation trying to raise conversation about how in our culture sweet treats and cakes are often used as a metaphor for sexual passion or courting? Or are they there for the sake of shocking people?

What are your interpretations of this work?

Goth Tourist in Glasgow

On my little holiday in Glasgow, I indulged myself by visiting various art museums. But, not all darkly inclined people are such art museum freaks as me, so I am going to feature just four sights that are rather gothy and are available all year around. All of these also happen to be free of charge.

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum are an extensive collection of art, natural science, and history. The exhibit space is filled with paintings, statues, taxidermy animals, armors and what not.

My personal favourite of the artworks was this distressed Harpy by Mary Pownall (1902). The title of the work is The Harpy Celaeno. It was almost impossible to take a photo of the statue, for some reason my phone's camera refused to focus on it. Spooky.

The harpy is groping her chest, her claws bite into her own skin, and her face expression implicates sorrow and pain. Harpies are usually depicted without hands and often in groups, so this is an unusual sculpture. It is much more human than is customary.

From 1st of April till 1st of October 2017 they feature an exhibition of superheros and comics. It looks very interesting but unfortunately I did not get to see it.

Glasgow University & the Hunterian Museum

Magnificent Gothic architecture of the University is worth checking out, and so is the Hunterian Museum inside it. The museum is named after William Hunter (1718–1783), who was a former student of the University and a keen collector of all things marvelous. His collection was the base for the museum. Collection ranges from the artifacts of Ancient Rome to Physics inventions.

The most macabre part of the collection is the Anatomical and Pathological Collection. Many of the samples are human but some are disfigured animals with more heads and feet than is usual.

The Glasgow Botanical Gardens

Glasgow Botanic Gardens are a marvelous place but for goths and other macabre folk the Botanic Gardens offer a whole room dedicated to killer plants. These plants are carnivores and on my visit I learned that there are 5 different method categories for the plants to trap their pray. One of them being 'lobster pot traps which use inward and downward pointing hairs to force pray to move towards a digestive organ'.

I doubt these particular carnivorous plants in the photo use that method of 'lobster pot traps' but they sure are beautiful. The other rooms of the hothouses were very nice too.

Glasgow Necropolis

Last but not least, the Glasgow Necropolis. It is a Victorian garden cemetery and there are many beautiful and ornamental gravestones and memorials. The Friends of Glasgow Necropolis organize guided tours and it is a good idea to participate one if possible. The Friends of Glasgow guides give depth to your visit, because they can tell about the history of the graves and the cemetery.

If your visit doesn't match with the tour program, another thing I can recommend is to buy a book they've published: The Glasgow Necropolis After lives – Tales of Interments by Ruth Johnston. It costs £ 8 plus delivery but it does make your visit way better. Me and my friend had that book with us when we went on our visit and it was marvelous.

We started on the recommended route up the hill and every time we saw an interesting gravestone, we searched its photo from Johnston's book. The book includes 150 most interesting graves and Johnston has collected all sorts of facts about the artwork, the lives of the people who are buried there, and so forth.

I hope these tips will be helpful for another goth tourist in Glasgow!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: Monsters of Niki de Saint Phalle

In the end of August I went to see the exhibition of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002), that had just been opened in the art exhibition space called Taidehalli. It took me this long to write about it because September was a tremendously busy month for me.

A detail of a work by Niki de Saint Phalle

If you google Niki de Saint Phalle, the first images you'll get are photos of big, colorful, energetic and positive sculptures of female figures. And that was my narrow perception of her works before I went to the exhibition in August. In there I learned that a Monster is a reoccurring theme in Saint Phalle's works and many of her sculptures are dealing with negative experiences and trauma. Seeing this exhibition made me want to read Saint Phalle's autobiography.

Saint Phalle was a controversial and a brave woman, who had the courage to question narrow structures of the society and of the ways of making art. Instead of becoming an obedient housewife in the 50's, she started to create art and in the 60's she invented the "Shooting Paintings". They were large 3D structures with bags of paint inside them. Then the artist Saint Phalle and often the person who commissioned the work would shoot at the painting with a gun and thus break the bags of paint, which would create colorful areas on the painting. They would stop shooting when the work looked ready for them.

Even though Saint Phalle's working techniques are intriguing, the works produced by shooting were not the ones that interested me the most. For me some collages of found objects and paint and other materials were the ones that somehow reeked of grim and sinister aesthetics. One of them was a work with various names: Tyrannosaurus Rex/The Monster/Tir Dragon (Study for King Kong).

Saint Phalle has a distinguishable naïve style and this huge lizard is in a way quite cute. The details make it more sinister. The creature is constructed of crocodile figures, skulls, toy guns, and dismantled baby dolls. Unfortunately the close-up is blurred, the exhibition was very crowded and it was not easy to take photos. I hope you can still see there are crocodiles, a skull, and some toy guns.

As mentioned, monsters are a reoccurring figure in Saint Phalle's works and many of them deal with a childhood trauma. Saint Phalle has revealed that her father sexually abused her when she was 11 years old.

Occasionally Saint Phalle also depicted herself as a sort of a monster in her art, but that was about her own life choices and how they affected her family. After all, she pursued a career that in the 50's and the 60's was not for women and during that time period some people (many people!) thought she was a bad wife and a bad mother.

The work I liked the most in the art exhibition was named Le Château de Gilles de Rais (The Castle of Gilles de Rais). Gilles de Rais was a French nobleman from the 15th century. He fought in wars and was honored as a brave and righteous man. He retired from his duties as a young man and almost twenty years later he was sentenced to death as the first serial killer. According to the history books, after his heroic career he had abused and killed at least 200 children.

Saint Phalle herself is a distant relative of Gilles de Rais through her fathers side of the family. She was fascinated by how a man who was almost a saint could also be or become a satanic creature who enjoyed the suffering of children. The photo in the beginning of this post is a detail of this Castle. If you look closely to it, it features molested baby dolls and lizard-like creatures. The sculpture is much more grim if one knows the story of Gilles de Rais.

It would be highly inappropriate to say that "I hope you enjoyed this post!" but I do hope you found it at least interesting and maybe it will encourage you to explore the not-so-well known works of artists you know. There might be fascinating surprises!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: Ghosts and creepy sculptures

The road trip in July took me to the city of Joutsa in Central Finland. There resides the Art Center Haihatus (could be translated as a daydream or a fanciful idea). It is an artist run art center and they hold every summer a grand exhibition. Artists can also apply for residency in Haihatus.

The exhibition area consists of three buildings and their garden, and a field area next to them. The place was filled with all kinds of works but mostly installations or statues, like this dragon like creature:

The three buildings have names, Haihatus, Utopia, and Fantasia. In Utopia was the main exhibition, or at least I felt like it. This skeleton is a small detail (it is the size of a two-year-old) of an installation that filled one room. I'm not sure if it is done with papier-mâché or is it some sort of clay.

In the attic was a grand installation by Jouko Korkeasaari. The name of the work is "Ett spök, spöket, spök" which is oddly almost Swedish. It almost says "A ghost, the ghost, ghosts", like in a dictionary but it is spelled wrong. I am pretty sure that is the point, because these creatures looming between hanging sheets are almost like ghosts, but there is something wrong in them.

I think the one above seems to be afraid of the viewer. Usually ghosts are supposed to be the scary ones.

This too seems like it is reserved. In the back of the room was a window open, so the sheets moved a bit in the breeze. Very spooky!

In the building called Fantasia we found the most bleak or grim works. The rooms were very dark, there were practically no lights and I guess I missed some information board or something because I could not find information about who made these works. Nor have I any idea what the titles of the artworks are.

This here is some sort of a mummified troll. Not real, of course. The text says "Please do not feed the trolls". Underneath was placed a typewriter, perhaps as a symbol for making up stories and fairy tales.

This here is a very old basin for bathing little children. The legs are from an old table and the basin is filled with bones. Clearly bones of a quite large creature.

No idea what is the point of this but it is cute in some very odd way. The feet have little paws so it sort of looks like a very abstract version of a pet.

I hope you found these works interesting! Next time I'll be back with another Creepy Reads Review.

Gothic Art in Spotlight: In a sleep so deep it might be death

Happy and prosperous new year!

Today in Gothic Art in Spotlight I wish to write about an artwork by Finnish sculptor called Mia Hamari. The artist prefers to be called a sculptor but she creates beautiful paintings too. The work I am concentrating to is actually an oil painting on wood with two small wooden sculptures attached to it.

The work is called Valvojat which could be translated as the Supervisors or the Guardians or even as the Overseers. It refers to the idea that when a human is sleeping, spirit entities, like guardian angels for example, are guarding the sleep and that no harm is done to the person sleeping.

This is a very bleak painting. In the museum's info sign it read that the painting depicts "a sleeping boy". I am not sure how eternal that sleep is, if you know what I mean. Even more uncanny is the point of view: the boy looks like he is watched from an adult's viewpoint, while the boy is lying on bare ground. If one looks at the painting straight from the front, that other wooden figure looks like a melted wax candle, you know the kind people used to have in a wake.

Actually, the wooden sculptures are like small protecting totems. The other one at the top corner is shaped to resemble a stuffed toy dog and the other is slightly more ambiguous. It could be a doll or some sort of a toy bear. The face is distorted and a bit creepy. The skin of the boy looks damaged in some places, hinting of violence, and makes this painting ever so disturbing.

The painting is quite large and this painted little boy is as tall as a living 7-year-old. Or at least I thought so at the time I saw it, I have no idea how tall an average 7-year-old is. It was an impressive painting in the Oulu Museum of Art. This artwork was made during the years 2009 and 2010. The artist's own son was the model for this boy.

This ominous sleep the boy is in reminds me of old shamanism and pagan religions that were flourishing in the woods of my homeland centuries and centuries before the actual state of Finland. Shamans would often get themselves into trance to travel to the lands of dreams and even death to seek knowledge and help from various spirits.

Thanks for reading, and do tell in the comments what you think of this little boy!

Creepy Reads Review: Taxidermy Art by Robert Marbury

I bought a copy of Robert Marbury's Taxidermy Art - A Rogue's guide to the work, the culture, and how to do it yourself on my trip to New York last spring. I think I bought it from the museum shop on MoMA. Marbury is one of the founders and the director of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy and an acknowledged artist.

As the title suggest, this book is non-fiction and for a person like me, who has little knowledge about how to actually make taxidermy or about its history, this was a good and informative opus. I also like the way Marbury writes, he does not became too repetitive even though the book consists of artist presentations and there are only so many ways to express certain basic information.

After the introduction to the book at hand there is also a short and compact introduction to the history of taxidermy and also to those historical persons who contributed to the development of taxidermy practices. I like that part very much, that the contemporary artists are contextualized like that.

Taxidermy Art introduces artists from all over the world, which is fantastic. Well, most of them are from the US, a few from the UK, and a couple from Europe and New Zeeland and Australia. But as the opus states the artists introduced in it are the most popular and well-known ones at the moment. It seems that taxidermy art is more popular in the English-speaking world and hence most artists are from those countries. The book presents 21 artists/artist duos.

Here are two of my favorite works and I would love to have one of these (or another of her works, her website is like a candy store for me!) myself: Still Birth (Green) and Still Birth (Blue) by Polly Morgan.

Lisa Black from New Zeeland makes gorgeous works in which animal and machine merge. I had not known about her works if I had not bought Taxidermy Art.

I can happily recommend this book. The photos are fantastic and in the end there are even instructions on how to make a taxidermy oneself. Though it is not like I am going to try them anytime soon.

Gothic Art in Spotlight: disturbing findings from Vaasa and a bat exhibition

This post is under label Gothic Art in Spotlight, although I am at the same time writing a bit about the road trip of mine. The simple reason for this is that I encountered the works during my road trip and in the same city these were was an exhibition of bats too!

Main stars of this post are artworks by Tapani Kokko, and Eemil Karila. The were in Kuntsi, the Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa. The exhibition was called Out of the box and it was the annual summer exhibition, featuring the newest work of well known Finnish artists.

The self portrait

The work by Karila was put as a teaser in the previous post, so let's start with it. The name of this sculpture is Self portrait as a reindeer and it was made 2014. It is mixed media work, so when visiting the art museum of Vaasa the visitor will not know any more about the materials used to create this work.

I am a law obeying citizen, so I did not touch the artwork to figure if the fur is genuine reindeer.  The head is 1:1 size and I am ready to bet money that the antlers at least are of a reindeer. Like many deer animals, reindeer drop their antlers yearly. Tedious fun fact No. 13: Reindeer antler is the fastest growing bone in the world. It can grow up to two centimeters in 24 hours.

This self portrait looks a bit like the Wolf Man in the first black and white movies, doesn't it? I love the fact that instead of making himself a majestic reindeer galloping in the wild, the artist features himself as a mount on the wall.

Karila was born in Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland province in Finland but he has moved to Berlin.

In April I featured a horned self portrait by an American artist, so if humanoid heads with antlers or horns interest you, go and check it out!


You better watch out, you better not cry...

Then the more disturbing and creepier one. This fine sculpture is made by Kokko year 2014. The statue is carved of wood. Kokko has used wood as material for many of his works. The works tend to be naivistic but there is usually a more gruesome aspect to them. It is said that Kokko brought carnivalism into the wood carved art in Finland.

The statue is hidden in a separated room from a larger exhibition area. You can see the room is dark, except for a source of light on the left. You boldly step into the room and gaze the opposite wall. Nothing. You turn to see if something is placed close to the light. No. The light is the only object in the room.

And then you flinch and some curse words might taint the air.

The light is a disturbingly grinning elf from Santa Claus' workshop. 

The name of this sculpture is A Gnome. So, instead of being a creepy little helper of Santa, it might be a regular garden gnome, ready to ambush you from under the rhubarb bush!

It is hideous and if you look closely, is that blood dripping down its beard?

I apologize for the poor quality but you are not usually allowed to use flash in museums and using another source of light would've lessened the creepyness of this creature hunching in a dark room.

That is it about the disturbing sculptures, I would love to know what you thought of them!

The bat exhibition

Vaasa has many museums and it is a nice place for a tourist to spend some days. There is an amusement park, possibilities to shop and experience culture, and the Kvarken Archipelago on the coastline of Vaasa is on UNESCO's World Heritage List. The natural history museum conserving material of the Archipelago is called Terranova. Since I have a tiny sci-fi freak inside me, I can't help but to smile for this.

In the same facilities is the Ostrobothnian Museum, concentrating on nature too, and they had an exhibition called Shadowed by the vampires - the secret world of bats. I actually had already seen it, since it is produced by the Finnish Natural History Museum in Helsinki and I had seen it at their museum almost three years ago.

I wanted to refresh my memory on bats and my travel companion had not seen the bat exhibition so we went to explore. The exhibition is really good, they have covered bats and their habits from many aspects. There is a lot of information about the creatures, why they are so misunderstood and what can people do to help keeping bats from becoming endangered species.

Again, all material is in three languages, Finnish, Swedish, and English. You can see from the photo above the information boards are cut into the shape of a resting bat.

The title of the display mentions vampires but they are in a teeny tiny role. one of the major points of the exposition is that the vampire legends have caused a lot of harm for all different bat species, because superstitious humans try to kill them even though they are not only harmless, they often have an important role in the ecosystem and polluting patches of vegetables humans rely on.

Above is a close-up of one of the cabinets that featured the way people have mistreated bats and had all kinds of superstitious beliefs about them. The title of this section is "Dark forces and witchcraft".

The exhibition is a travelling show, meaning that different museums and places can rent it to have at their facilities. It has mostly traveled in Finland but due to the three languages, I can't see why it could not be taken abroad.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the artworks!

Next up: Art featuring giant toys, odd phenomena from the Neolithic age and Finnish folklore.

Gothic Art in Spotlight: Will o' the Wisp by Harriet Hosmer

I have been in DC over a month now and I must say I simply love the Smithsonian museums! They are free, they have such a variety of different museums and they all are relatively close to each other. Of the museums in DC my favorite is probably the National Gallery of Art, even though they are currently renovating their East Building that has all the contemporary art. Lucky for me, their collection of European art from the 19th and 20th centuries is of great quality.

A tiny disclaimer before I proceed: I have not yet seen here any art that is "super goth", but I do not want to bury my art posts completely, so I am posting about art that has at least some intriguing nuances towards the aesthetics of goth subculture.

Even though I just praised the National Gallery of Art, the sculpture I am going to feature in this post is not from there. It can be seen in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The name of this marble statue is Will o' the Wisp and it was sculpted by Harriet Hosmer 1858. I had not encountered Hosmer's work before, or at least I do not remember if I have. I have this feeling that Europeans do not tend to see that much American art that is over 100 years old. Contemporary artists are much better known on the other side of Atlantic Ocean. I must add, that Hosmer was not solely based in the United States, she spend a considerable amount of time in Italy, learning sculpting and making her career, so I think I really should have known more about her and her work.

I am sad to say I do not know much about this statue. I searched information about it and apparently Harriet Hosmer made a series of whimsical sculptures and that series itself is called Will o' the Wisp. The statues present little creatures with notions to mythology.

I remember hearing a long time ago one definition of goth subculture and it was that "goth is longing for a time and place that never was nor has yet been." Not accurate, sure, but it does highlight the fact that goth aesthetics do not belong, that they differ from the mainstream. Mythological statues too are a bridge to time and place that never really was. It might be just my constrained point of view on goth people, but I have this feeling that most goths are interested of supernatural, fantasy and sci-fi and unexplained disturbing horror. The way I see it, imagination has an important role in this subculture.

The statue made by Hosmer is intriguing because the little humanoid character has wings like a bat. That is something rarely done. In paintings you see much more devilish characters lurking with bat-wings but they are seldom made out of marble. The sculpture is an unsettled merge of childhood's innocence and falling out of grace with those nasty wings. (I personally think bat-wings are adorable of coarse, but you know what I mean!)

The little bird on top of the head of this humanoid looks to me as if it is a little owl. Owls were associated with Athene (Pallas Athena), the goddess of knowledge and tactical war in Ancient Greece. Harriet Hosmer made many statues inspired of the Ancient mythology. Some of her most famous sculptures are of Medusa, but alas, I did not spot any statues of women with snake hair in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

It seems that on the head of the statue is some kind of helmet. You can hardly see the helmet from front, since the curly hair of this slightly demonic child hide it. Another symbolic object is the torch. It could symbol a great many things, it could be a homage to the Olympics, or to Prometheus who saved humans by stealing the secret of fire from the gods. Most likely it is pointing towards Athene too, since fire is also seen as a symbol of knowledge. I do not know what the bat-wings are referring to, so if any of you have an idea and can tell if they too have something to do with Athene, please let me know!

Hosmer was born 1830 and she died 1908. She was one of the best known women artists of her time. Her father was supportive and Hosmer was very athletic, had the chance to study sculpting and she even developed some new techniques for statue making, like how to convert ordinary limestone into marble.

I love making these extra inquiries after seeing some lovely artwork. I do hope you enjoyed my post too!