Creating Meanings on Ice by Photos and Textiles

Northern residents experience ice as an element that shapes their everyday surroundings. This experience is physical, multisensory and mundane. It discreetly defines the aesthetic experience of everyday environment and the landscape of the soul. The aesthetic understanding of environment has both individual elements and culturally shared meanings. Different interpretations can be compared with children’s accordion drawings, the art of exquisite corpse. In exquisite corpse the drawer or designer sees only a narrow slice of the whole image. Next designer is invited to the play and to continue the work based on his or her associations and interpretations. Thus different images and materials soon overlap each other in a continuous design process. This article examines how a photographer’s ice themed photographs and videos are created and how the initial works change when photographs are captured on jacquard woven fabric in a textile design process. This process resembles an exquisite corpse drawing and this paper provides information on how two different artists, the photographer and the textile artists, developed a working method for their common work. The study proposes a working method for multidisciplinary working, especially for multi-artistic workgroups. The findings of this article are based on a series of free themed discussions between the photographer Eija Timonen and the textile artists Heidi Pietarinen. The aim of these discussions was to understand each other's perceptions and representations of ice. The concept of exquicite corpse (Exquisite corpse 2015) served as a metaphor for the construction of the discussions. It enabled on one hand ecstatic and eager discussions on the concrete doing of representations of ice, and on the other hand analytical reflections on the role of the ice in making art. Timonen and Pietarinen did not even try to control the direction of the discussion. When a certain theme began to reoccur, it was decided that the conversation had reached a saturation point (Hirsjärvi & Remes & Sajavaara 2004, 181 - 182). Recurring themes consisted of cultural understanding, spatiality, multisensory, colour, structures and materiality. With these themes the artists were able to understand each other and share interpretations. They also understood that the themes were like the connection points in the exquicite corpse illustration. Next, the article opens the debate on the underlying works, and the common themes that structured the discussion.