THE SEA SEPARATES US

The Fine Arts Academy of Finland awarded its 2015 prize to  APT artist Camilla Vuorenmaa (b. 1979). Part of the prize is this exhibition in EMMA. Vuorenmaa is known as a young artist who in many ways has challenged the physical and traditional boundaries of painting.

Vuorenmaa’s carved wood paintings are hybrids of sculpture and painting that require time and physical strength to create. The style is rough and unvarnished, endowed with a playful decorativeness, the palette rich and striking. Some of the reliefs are like partitions, others feature elements of wall painting, a medium Vuorenmaa likes for its immediacy, momentariness and spatiality.

Vuorenmaa depicts people and humanity in her work. She searches for motifs in magazines and books and by taking photographs of things she sees. Creating the works for the exhibition in EMMA, she felt it increasingly important to meet and observe her subjects in authentic situations. She found the common thread of the show in a residency programme in Iceland in autumn 2015 when she got to accompany a fishing boat and observe fishermen working at sea and in the face of fundamental questions. The sea separates and unites people, just as people do to each other.

‘All the works in my exhibition are more or less associated with the age-old struggle for survival, the fight of the individual and the community to get ahead. The sea, sheep, wrestlers, ropes, men and women and indistinct human figures surrounded by ropes and nets.’ – Camilla Vuorenmaa 22 November 2015

Vuorenmaa graduated from the Department of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2005.