Laura Pakarinen
The Unknown Horse
10.2.-5.3.2023
My grandfather had a horse that was requisitioned during the war. To his sorrow, it never came back. My mother, who grew up on the same farm, had a horse called Piirto when she was young. She remembers this, even though she does not always remember who I am.
I drew Piirto 82 times. I kept drawing and the memory turned into an image and the image into movement. By drawing, I wanted to bring the memory back to life. I wanted it to be as real as Piirto was – flesh and blood. I wanted to recreate the memory on paper, even if it was done in a clumsy and fumbling manner using an erasable pencil.
With the work Uurna (“Urn”), I want to honor my late grandfather’s sorrow and memory of the horse that he never saw again. No one remembers the name of this unknown horse anymore, and there are no photographs left either.
The works featured in the exhibition The Unknown Horse belong to a series of works in which I examine themes related to loss, remembering and forgetting. My aim is to find out what it feels like to pursue a partly lost memory. By visual means, I try to depict the act of remembering that takes place in our heads. How constantly repeating a memory supports its existence and also us.
In addition to focusing on our own memory, I want my works to serve as a tribute to the things we remember. Even though we remember for ourselves, the things in our memories have existed regardless of us. The fate of these horses is filtered through us people but I hope that, through the story, each horse is also seen as a living, unique individual.
Laura Pakarinen (b.1983) is a Helsinki-based visual artist who earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022.
Passing of time, construction of memory and the relation between permanence and transience are recurring themes in Laura’s animations, paintings, Polaroids, and film experiments. In her last exhibited works (Kuvan Kevät 2022) she explored forgetting and remembering while trying to depict how it feels to chase a partly forgotten memory.
Contact details
laura.h.m.pakarinen(a)gmail.com
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