13.12.2024 — 12.1.2025

The small wood sculptures are a kind of fragments of life, which pop up the sedimentary layers of memory when I sit on the wood. I remembered the buses, house structures and roads I had carved as a child, a whole miniature village where my brother and I could completely immerse ourselves in the magic of play.

My intention was to connect the sculptures to each other with a weave similar to a neural network. During the working process, the weft has shrunk into short spirals, a bit like umbilical cord clips, as an indication of connection. I thought about the decay of memories, death, the cycle of carbon atoms. The environment becomes soulful and I imagine the presence of the dead in the plants, trees and stones. Fossilized life in the plastic garbage on the seashore has condensed through oil into a plastic item that is thrown into the sea as unnecessary. I press a piece of plastic against my ear and hear the thump of dinosaur footsteps.

The exhibition has been supported by the Svenska Kulturfonden.

Veikko Björk (b. 1960); I carve memories of the life lived in the wood. A tree is sunlight twisted into a spiral, which supports life on Earth. Veikko Björk lives and works in Helsinki and sometimes also in his birthplace Kitee. He graduated with a master’s degree in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in tila-aika department in 1998.