Camilla Vuorenmaa’s (b. 1979 in Tampere, Finland) solo exhibition I promised to come back for her birthday is based on the artist’s everyday fantasies and the meaningful action heroes of her youth. Vuorenmaa’s new works have been influenced by her role as a mother and the resulting contradictory feelings. Reading her teenage diaries also evoked memories. In the exhibition, stories and time are layered, the artist’s childhood fears and joys reflected on the now. “Painting, in the same way as life, can be frightening, and still, one wants to approach it.” In the end, it is a question of daring to let go, let the hand’s movement lead, anticipate.

Last autumn, Vuorenmaa painted a series of studies of Princess Leia, one of the main characters of the Star Wars movies, portrayed by Carrie Fisher. Along with the series, her first abstraction – painted at the same time – initiated Vuorenmaa’s internal process for this exhibition. “I reminisced about my teenage sources of strength, and Ripley, the androgyne hero of my childhood films, and Princess Leia became part of my new series.” The reinterpretation of the artist’s teenage idols revealed their weaknesses and incompleteness. The exhibition’s title refers to Aliens (1986) and the lines spoken by Ripley, the protagonist (portrayed by Sigourney Weaver), who is woken up from her hypersleep in space and learns that her daughter had meanwhile died of old age.

The exhibition features abstract topics painted on relief-like wooden bases typical of Vuorenmaa. She focuses on direct emotion and movement represented by colours and strokes. “Nonrepresentational works may include representational elements. They are unintentional and rise from the subconscious.” The paintings draw from various influences ranging from tapestries to Finnish modernism, and they include images of dream landscapes. Their tones are bright and magical, sombre and shining. Engravings and irregularities visible on the surface create a raw dynamic in the paintings. The artist is fascinated by wood as a material: it has a will of its own and requires a reciprocal and physical process. The paintings’ three-dimensional form and roughness direct the viewer’s gaze from the surface to the depth.

With a two-part audiovisual work completed for this exhibition, Vuorenmaa steps on unfamiliar ground. In the first part, titled Hyvää loppuyötä (Good rest of the night), we hear sentences from the artist’s personal diaries; in the second part, titled My name is Ellen, we hear lines from the Alien films, recited from memory.

Camilla Vuorenmaa’s (b. 1979, Tampere, Finland) works have been displayed in private and group exhibitions in the Finnish EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, the Danish Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, and the Swedish Galleri Thomassen in Gothenburg. In 2017, Vuorenmaa was nominated for the Ars Fennica award. She has been awarded the designated William Thuring Prize (2018), the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Prize (2015), and the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition Solo Award (2014). Her works are included in the collections of the EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and the Niemistö and Saastamoinen Foundations. Thank you to The Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the artist’s work.