Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house
Watercolour 30x21, 2014
Man is a house.
Everything started in my childhood when I moved into the big yellow stone house in Tampere. Of course I did not realise at the time, how breathtaking and life-changing the consequences would be. The house with its tall, airy, quiet rooms, where you could curl up on the wide windowsills and gaze at the magical garden and watch how autumn turned into winter, and winter into spring. Lots of beautiful hideaways and cubbyholes in unexpected places. The mysterious attic and the basement, where you could make the most remarkable findings. The door to the steep basement stairs that you passed quickly, with a vague feeling that something dangerous could reach out to you from the other side. But above all the meditative silence and the sense of infinity of the house, its tranquility, its beauty and its presence.
We, the children, were able to run around freely and play in the beautiful surroundings. The constantly ongoing transformation of the lilac arbour, the berry bushes and the fruit trees enhanced the pulse of the changing of the seasons. The magical ice formations on the beach, different every day, and the sparkling wintry skiing tours to the lighthouse of Siilinkari, with oranges and cocoa in our backpacks. Water dripping from the eaves and the scent of earth in the spring, the first parade of hedgehogs of the year, the cubs walking behind their mother, eagerly exploring the surroundings. It was an oasis in the middle of town.
When we moved into an apartment in Helsinki in 1986, everything was suddenly gone. The silence was replaced by the noise of the apartment building, the air and the light by an almost unbearable stuffiness. When we moved away, the house was demolished, and the the beautiful old cultural environment was transformed into an area of apartment blocks. I longed for the paradise of my childhood and felt such grief and emptiness that I could not bring myself to return to the site until 2010.
But really important things are indifferent to parameters set by external reality. The house started to live its life in my dreams. The real house was replaced by the house of my dreams. How can it be possible that we never took any photographs of the house while we lived there? Of course, fragments of the house can be seen on photos taken on festive occasions, but there are no photos of the house itself or its surroundings. Perhaps the lack of photos has enhanced the need for internal pictures. It is like an amputated part of my soul, constantly returning and reminding me of its presence. I constantly return to the house in my dreams, I visit the rooms and explore them. Sometimes I am a child, sometimes an adult, sometimes both at the same time. Sometimes I am alone and sometimes I am accompanied by someone. Often I return to look for something that I have lost.
But the house has not continued its existence only in my dreams, it has continued to exist in my outer reality as well. In 1993 my husband and I bought an old shipmaster's homestead, built in 1850, in Åland. For 17 years we commuted between Helsinki and Åland while we restored the house. Of course the house was a different one, as well as the location, but the atmosphere is the same as that of the house of my childhood. The same stillness and light, lilacs and berry bushes in the garden. And everything is located in an old cultural environment. In my dreams the houses and their surroundings are merged into one another.
In 2011 the house found its way into my paintings, at first in the form of interiors, and later as constructions. The renovation of the house in Åland was finished, and we moved there for good. We have now started to renovate the outhouses, and my new studio is nearly completed. The work never ends. Moving to Åland and the ongoing renovation have brought chaos and a change of identity into my life. In order to process that, I have started to work with buildings in a state of transformation in my art, buildings in various states of decay and construction. Renovating a house is a concrete way to experience and leave traces in time. You are preserving something old and constructing something new. The past and the present meet and walk hand in hand.
Houses are like people, a continuing process of construction and decay. The outer and the inner world, dream and reality, meet in my paintings, like a giant identity project that captures my inner and my outer reality, my physical surroundings, my dreams and my art.
Translation Birgitta Björkqvist
