25 November – 18 December 2022
Hippolyte Studio

One of the many parallel processes shaping Milla Toukkari’s Die Verwandlung exhibition has been an infatuation with a particular plywood board. At the heart of this interest was the fascination with the wood grain when becoming visible. While passing a construction site’s fence, Toukkari observed the pattern of the softwood becoming visible as the boards turned grey. She began to dream about printing the plywood and what the ink might reveal about that board holding up the courthouse.

After a negotiation, Toukkari acquired the plywood board for herself—but in the studio, the board was no longer a building material. Instead, as a printing surface, it produced an image which conceptualised the plywood, the building material, and the courthouse’s construction site. In the exhibition, the wooden board’s transformation process is also combined with literary and biographical references, through which Toukkari addresses the artificial categories of man and nature, art and work.

In her works, Toukkari explores the conveyance of the line in other connotations and new connections. In addition to the printed image, she explores how lines are read concerning other two-dimensional artistic formats—in revealing, making visible, and recording reality—like photography. The installation in the exhibition includes an depleted plywood board, which has given its lines and grains to printed images, collages, and the process of artistic research condensed into an artist’s book.

Concave and broken, hair-like drawings and printed lines simultaneously fill the surface and make it visible. On the one hand, small elements of the image draw a more recognisable picture and, on the other hand, help to question its surface. The intermingling network of lines could also suggest the wall we have created between ourselves and reality. By turning away from their origin and transforming their shape into the conceptual, those lines bring out something new; the image of the wooden grain shows the timber more clearly. Image of fur shows the animal. Typeface suffixes reveal the author.

Milla Toukkari (b. 1986) is a visual artist, art teacher, and museum technician who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts in 2015, working especially with printed images, text, and installations. She is one of the founding members of the KELLARIPRESS graphic art studio in Helsinki. Toukkari studies the essence of the printed image conceptually and predominantly from the field of printmaking. She finds art impulses shaped around concepts more interesting than methodological boundaries. Toukkari has held solo and joint exhibitions in Finland, e.g. in Helsinki, Turku, Tampere, Lahti, and Hämeenlinna. In addition, her works are in several national collections. In recent years, Toukkari has worked in various international residencies in Europe and the United States.