Laura Rämö
L I G H T W E I G H T
1.3.–24.3.2019
Featuring video projections, sound and spatial elements, the LIGHTWEIGHT installation explores transience. Mainly created using the stop motion technique, the works deal with the blurred interface between inanimate and living as well as magical and ordinary.
When making stop motion animations, every single movement of my hand on the material is recorded mercilessly, so sometimes I barely dare to breathe. Sensitivity is present throughout the process from delicate materials to the final outcome. The process is about being, playing with everything that is vulnerable, transient, soft or obscure. I grab what has dropped, I work it and blow on it to make it move. My work is based on three things: conifer needles, wool and a dead bumblebee. In the background there is also a desire to preserve, to make something non-human and its value visible.
Czech animator Jan Švankmajer has said that “animation is, so far, the only way of breathing life into inanimate things”. This sentence is a reminder about the connection between moving images and the tradition of magic. In the exhibition, death and the cycle of life are linked to the element of earth that catches those that fall. Movement stops but in death matter does not disappear, it changes shape. In decomposition, organic matter returns to the source materials.
Laura Rämö (b. 1989) is a Helsinki-based artist who works with moving image, photography, text and installations. She graduated from the Lahti Institute of Design in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in photography. She is currently finishing her master’s studies in photography at Aalto University. The artist’s works have been on display at several joint and group exhibitions in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. LIGHTWEIGHT is her first solo exhibition.
Arts Promotion Centre, National Council for Audiovisual Art, has supported the exhibition.
Further information:
laura.katariina.ramo(at)gmail.com
+358 50 573 0260
www.lauraramo.com
