Maaria Jokimies: You wanted me to paint a person whom life has made beautiful
Maaria Jokimies: You wanted me to paint a person whom life has made beautiful
”A five-hour journey in the backseat of a car numbs my legs. When I’m old enough, I travel alone by train, two transfers, sandwiches wrapped in paper. At your place kilometers away, there is always early summer, vacation and play. I look at black and white photographs and listen to your stories about their faded characters, you paint the looks and actions of past generations. I draw flowers and girls in that never-ending, thick, square journal. They are pretty, but you would like me to draw a person with wrinkles, someone whom life has made beautiful.
I ring the doorbell and wait for the nurse to arrive. Behind a locked door, you sit in a chair with others yet alone. I say hello and seek recognition in your gaze. On the bed in your white room, you relax while talking about your parents, gently and painfully. But you don’t always want to be there, in this moment you say you manage, sticking signs here and there. Words are hard to find. On the wall hangs a self-portrait I painted in high school; you tell me that it portrays you.”
The central theme of Maaria Jokimies’ exhibition is the presence of the past in the present, which she has approached through her grandmother’s memory disorder and her own nostalgic longing. The different techniques approach the theme from different directions.
In the oil paintings, Jokimies mainly depicts her grandmother from her own perspective, emphasizing her own point of view and at the same time seeking to identify with grandmother by imagining the reality she experiences with dementia. In small paintings made with watercolours and ink on canvas, Jokimies recalls her grandmother’s archive by depicting the pages of photo albums and small everyday memories kept between them, such as recipes, dried flowers and paper dolls. In paper works and woodcuts printed with gouache, Jokimies depicts important and fascinating objects and details from her childhood visits to her grandmother’s.
”While working with the paintings, I pondered the mutability of memories over time: how new information accumulates to modify the interpretation of memories, or how old memories strengthen when the brain is no longer able to produce new ones.”
Maaria Jokimies (b. 1992) graduated from Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Her paintings have been exhibited in many galleries in Finland, e.g., in the art museums of Lahti and Imatra. There are works from Jokimies in the collections of the Tampere Art Museum and the Prime Minister’s Office Finland.
The exhibition has been supported by the Héléne and Walter Grönqvist Foundation.
HAA Gallery
Suomenlinna C1, 00190 Helsinki
Opening hours: Tue–Thu 12–6 pm, Fri–Sun 12–4pm