Timo Sälekivi & Päivi Hintsanen - Exhibition in Porvoo, Finland

We will have a sort of joint exhibition - but still not. The artworks will be in the same space in the gallery, but we haven't planned anything together. So in that sense we have two solo exhibitions in one space...

For the poster I used the same layout as in the exhibitions before, only Timo's bird image was changed. For the exhibition opening invitations I used the same idea as we had in Poriginal gallery, Porvoo, a few years back. Only now the card is printed both ways also to b-side where there is an invitation text: another one in Finnish and then another one in Swedish...

Opening in September 1, at 6pm - welcome!

What remains - ex votos - exhibition in Portugal

A joint exhibition organized by a Portuguese born Rita Vargas. The exhibition poster and other print material were designed by Minja Revonkorpi.

Random Prints vol. 2

Last year I started this project I call "my own personal art therapy" - Random Prints. The idea is, that I made a series of 90 numbered and signed prints which I left all over when I was travelling. I've left teh prints in envelopes to random people to find and to keep. I hoped that those who found them would have filled in a small enquiry to tell me where the prints have ended up.

This year I'm going to make an interrai trip in Central Europe, and I've made a new print, called The Essence of Whispering Tree, which I'm going to leave to people to find.

I have written the last year's travels and whereabouts of the Random Prints vol.1 prints to Random Prints blog at randomprints.blogspot.com - and this year - hopefully - the stories will be continued.

Tunne maisema

Tunne maisema is a Jyväskylä Art Museum project can be interpreted in two ways: "Know your scenery" or "feel your scenery". The art museum project shows different view on interpretation of scenery and our environment via connecting works by pronounced Finnish painters Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865 -1931) and Pekka Halonen (1865 -1933) to some modern art, like photography and paintings. I made the visual design for the Tunne maisema site and I also executed the whole site. It contains the introduction of the works and artists, some extra information about the context of the artist (for example timelines of Gallen-Kallela's and Halonen's lives) different kind of tasks for both adults and school children and also a "sound scenery" of how the sounds affect the pictures. So, massive project.

My brain almost popped with this one. But surprise: not with the actual project: we had a couple of very efficient meetings during spring and talked all the content through. With so many people everything could have gone wrong in so many ways, but it didn't. I got the material early, I got a lot freedom to do the things however I wanted as long as the mainpoint came out right (which actually always helps a lot!), there were only a few things to be changed... but my web connection went totally off on the beginning of June, just when the project was truly starting on my part. So, I have a key for wireless connection and though it was a saviour, in the end I had to finish this massive project with really slow mobile connection. But after a lot of ()=/#)(¤/)(# and a lot of ####¤)(#/)¤/ I got it online - this morning early.

*Phuh.*

Only in Finnish: www.tunnemaisema.fi

Dipday

DipDay has been on my mind for ages, but it was only now when I got myself to add some dipdayish look to the blog. The logo of the event is designed by Tiina Leino and I used the logo form in making the background design. DipDay project was started, when textile designer Ulla Lapiolahti and I started think like: People knit in public (KIP) - so why not dye in public (DIP)? The idea was introduced to the Dyers' Guild (Association of Dyers) of Finland and they were also interested. So we decided to organize this event for the first time on 2011 when it's the tenth anniversary of Dyer's Guild. The date is (and propably will be on future years) September 2, which in Finland is a "name day" of Sini, which means blue (sort of).

We invite dyers from all over the world to dye together and open the doors for public to see. The events can be small - just invite some friends and ask also some other people to see - or as big as you choose. As we know that the dyeing may be difficult on public places the DipDay events can also be organized in people's backyards. The main point however should be, that the event should be public - if someone wants to come and take a look, it should be easy!

There are no rules or specimens - you can organize sun dyeing events in the park just to show how to put the yarn in the glass jars or have a bigger happening in your backyard or any other place. It doesn't matter if you have one dye pot on fire or ten of them. It doesn't have to be "professional" - pure experiments are welcome too.

So, if you are dyer of any kind or interested about colours in someway, please click yourself to the DipDay blog at dipday.blogspot.com

Plankko

The cooperative Plankko was founded at the end of last year. The members are mostly artists - the one I talked with most before deciding to join the cooperative was Kirsi Neuvonen. After all the paper works and official background work and such, Plankko is now taking its first steps in the real world, first by organizing and producing exhibitions and later with more innovative approach to art events. Our main aim is to have an own art gallery in Helsinki, one day.

www.plankko.fi

Höyrygalleria

Hoyrygalleria ("Steam Gallery") is the new soon to be opened gallery, which is owned by Emalipuu / Enamelwood owners Ulla Huttunen and Arto Salminen. The gallery will open to the harbour of Korpilahti, Jyväskylä (Finland), in the beginning of June, 2011. The name of the gallery comes from the old steam saw building where the gallery now takes place.

The gallery website is very simple and is based on the logo graphics designed for Hoyrygalleria by Tiina Leino. As any CMS wouldn't have worked and Ulla would like to update the new herself, I used very basic site plan and then implemented some rss feed includes from Höyrygalleria's blog, so that the news always show on the first page. There is also Admarket's flickrSLiDR used in the front page: it makes the photo gallery automaticly of the images uploaded to Flickr.

This is propably only the temporary page - as the gallery starts running and all the smaller things are cleared, we'll propably rock the site - totally!

www.hoyrygalleria.fi

Alvar Aalto Museum website reneval

...again. But for a good reason: there has been changes in the organisation and the museum wanted their front page to show that. Some parts of the site remained the same, like the top two grey-blue navigation bars. The name of the site changed from Alvar Aalto Foundation to Alvar Aalto Museum and the content and hierarchy of the navigation was renewed totally. The front page now carries and photoslider with images of current event, and also, below that, introduction to four main destinations of the museum: the museums both in Jyväskylä and Helsinki, the head quarters of academy in Helsinki and Aalto's own summer house in Muuratsalo.

I designed the new layout and was involved also in drafting the new site hierarchy.

I'm quite pleased to this and quite proud of it, as it was realized in very short time - from scratch to reality!

www.alvaraalto.fi

Tarinakone logo

As the lamb image I designed for Anne's company Tarinakone suddenly proved to be quite good "trademark" itself, Anne decided to renew her logo to fit to it. The logo is now based on both the old design of the word Tarinakone ("Story machine"), with the letters a-n-n-e highlighted, and one of the lambs.

At the same time these designs went into use as her Moo minicards.

The Sketchbook Project

As I seem to live a very computerized life, I deciced to take part to the Sketchbook Project organized by Art House Co-op. The project collected over 28 000 sketchbooks so I was glad that somebody picked just my book at the opening - what are the odds?!

This was totally art therapy project for me, with no higher aims, but since I illustrated and wrote the whole story about A Little Witch Who Knits, I got more and more inspired. I'm waiting for the scanned view of the book - so I can get proper views from it too. Images on this posting are all from "in making" stage.

THE SKETCHBOOK PROJECT ON TOUR:
Brooklyn Art Library February 19-27, 2011 / 103A N. 3rd St., Brooklyn, NY 11211 | Open Tue - Sun / Noon - 8pm / Closed Mondays (L train to edford Ave.)
Austin Museum of Art March 12th, 2011 (during the SXSW festival!) Austin, TX
SPACE Gallery March 30-April 2, 2011 Portland, ME
The Granite Room April 8-9, 2011 Atlanta, GA
Transformer Gallery April 11-30, 2011 Washington, DC
Form/Space Atelier June 10-12, 2011 Seattle, WA
111 Minna Gallery June 18, 2011 San Francisco, CA
Hyde Park Arts Center July 14-17, 2011 Chicago, IL
Full Sail University July 29-July 31, 2011 Winter Park, FL

Pehtoorska blog

"Pehtoorska" aka Anne Kojola contacted me last autumn and we discussed about her website. Pehtoorska is a one woman company, and mostly from hobby base. Anne takes photos of people, nature, events and phenomenons, and she sells her photos and the postcards made from them. After a discussion of her needs and future use and budget, we came to conclusion that maybe the blog would be the best for her purposes. Blogger seemed to be most easiest way to blog, so we chose that. Anne chose the background from free Blogger backgrounds, I designed the header, tweeked the html a bit and made the blog settings for her.

pehtoorska.blogspot.com

Random prints

During August and September 2010 I'll leave a numbered and signed edition of my pigment ink print in envelopes around Europe to random people to find and to keep. I hope that those who find them will fill in a small enquiry to tell me where the prints have ended up. The travels and whereabouts of these images will be seen at http://randomprints.blogspot.com/ this fall.

Tarinakone website & graphic design

Tarinakone is a small one person company that specializes in creating stories for products. Tarinakone is owned by my friend Anne and she wanted to have "something else": not so ordinary website with a lot of information, but something very very simple - not much words but more of those seventies graphic feeling. We had a quite long time when I found hard to catch any ideas because there were so many roads to follow, but finally we found two roads to follow: first of all the lamb and then the next one were the words.

Anne has used a red yarn for demonstrating the story telling - the whole point of her company is to find a red yarn of the basic idea and then bring something extra to it. She had a story of a very sad lamb in mind, who first would be very down with all her wool messed up, then a "waking" lamb noticing that something is happening and lastly a very cheered up lamb with all her red wool on good condition! She had first ordered the designs from another designer and they were a little more traditional comic style which made it hard to include to the seventies inspirated red, black and white design. Then, after thinking what comes to my mind of 70s and those colours (the obvious inspiration is seen on the right side - I'm not gonna even try to cover up that...), I designed three very simple lambs. And from there the whole website design started.

Only, there was not so much to design. Anne wanted to have only three pages with very little information and very strong front page, to which she wanted to put words - so I ended up making this draft for her front page.



www.tarinakone.fi

EDIT: The website has now been renewed to more "wordy" version (not my design).

Website for printmaker Aino Pajari

Aino wanted something fresh (turquoise colour was one of her wishes) and simple, so I designed this really basic site with absolutely no extra fuss aroud. The pages show image details very plainly and by clicking each image there is a introduction of work shown.

The only thing is, though, that the site is still on it's old url at personal.inet.fi/taide/aino-k.pajari, at some kind of "free" account which doesn't support for example ajax or anything like that. Aino will consider new server this autumn.

Jyväskylä Adult Education Centre

I was asked to redesign Jyväskylä Adult Education Centre's website. They wanted something very fresh and joyful - and still informative. The site is using the Jyväskylä City CMS, which itself limits a bit, and the city also has some rules of what can and can't be done. However, when I set my eyes to the logo, I got this idea of "spinning" logos rightaway. There isn't of course any kind of movement really but for me, permission to play with the logo gave a lot to the final design.

It has happened me more than once, that my bright colour scenario has been approved but then after a few meetings everything is toned more subtle or changed to something blue - so I was so glad, when my colour suggestions - all those bright colours - were ok by themselves and that decicion didn't change.

www.jyvaskyla.fi/kansalaisopisto

Exhibition at Galleria Carree, Kuopio

My new series Hiljaisia harhoja / Quiet Mirages will be first seen in the three week exhibition in Galleria Carree, in Kuopio.

This series was quite hard to make for some unknown reason. All the images didn't come out as I had first planned, but I really like the image which is also seen (partly) on the invitation and poster, called Morning Dew.

Lisää väriä

The Lisää väriä ('More colour') is an event for every colour enthusiastic... One day lecture series on Thu June 10 (only in Finnish, though) includes several lectures from colour experts with various backgrounds. The one day colour event on Sat June 12 will hold potato printing workshop + several demonstrations, for example of how to make pigments from earth.

The event is planned by Print Center of Jyväskylä together with textile artist Ulla Lapiolahti and me and at the same time, it's Coloria's 10 year anniversary event.

The poster and the flyers are designed by Meri Tuomi, who was working in Coloria as a trainee for one month.

Program + info (in Finnish) http://www.coloria.net/lisaavaria/

Saarijärvi exhibition

There will be an exhibition of my Poissa - Absent series / installation in Saarijärvi this summer, from next Thursday until the end of August.

With this exhibition everything should be already in order; exhibited images were first shown last summer (so they are already printed), all the tools for setting up are collected in one place ready for use and all details are already cleared with the exhibition place.

I'm quite looking forward to this one.

Badges ---

--- Badges are already sold in the Jyväskylä Art Museum but now they are also available at the Jyväskylä Artists' Society Gallery Becker.
My Etsy shop of colouring images is closed for a while (I haven't got time to upload images) but I'll be tuning up my Monsterium products during the summer. After clearing my desk of zillions of small undone projects.

Uno and Wolmar

Today the net exhibition telling the story of two Finnish notable men, Uno Cygnaeus and Wolmar Schildt, was opened in a very ceremonious event in Jyväskylä University - where I couldn't unfortunately participate. How ever - after a slightly rocky road and verrrrrry tight schedule, the net exhibition was finally set online successfully.

This project has taken my whole spring actually - even though I had dozens of other projects planned as well.