Eeva-Liisa Puhakka
Can You Smell the Sun?
12.-27.7. 2014
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari 1
You can’t smell the sun or maybe you can, if you think that everything around you has an odor and in most cases that smell originates from the sun. Some years ago astronomers stated that the center of our galaxy actually would smell of rum. In a search for organic compounds they also found quantities of ethyl formate, which implies that our galaxy tastes like raspberries. Tastes like raspberries and smells like rum, or maybe the sun smells like amaretto with peanuts, but the sand definitely smells like sun and heat.
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. A scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit or another memory of baked cookies in the oven at grandma’s house in a countryside village or even a family barbecue in the late summer sunburnt grass yard… Hit a “tripwire” of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
“It always started with a smell and the feeling that went with it. The feeling transported her back to a particular place and the ambiance of the time. It was at the same time an image and an emotion with an image. It was like a clean oceanic perfume, per fumum, through smoke, in the hallway to the office kitchen or light fresh cut grass and a cucumber-like scent in an elevator or a moist soil odor during the first rain after a long dry period. She opened a bag of coffee beans in the kitchen and emptied it, then stuck her nose in the empty bag and inhaled. She opened the metal cap of a white vinegar bottle and it smelled like body wash, clean but at the same time like alcohol on a man’s breath. Her lunch, baked chicken wings, had that smell of when you take off your gloves after throwing snowballs. Wet, steamy, linty…”
Eeva-Liisa Puhakka makes media art and mixed media artworks. Puhakka tries to create works which are moments, atmospheric and narratives. Her works appear as surreal images in which fiction and reality meet, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. Puhakka has presented her works in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Russia, Senegal and the United States.
Eeva-Liisa Puhakka
p. 040-5239361
eeva-liisa.puhakka(at)iki.fi
www.eeva-liisa.net
