Nature, Plastic, Artifice

Tuula Närhinen is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland, whose artistic practice mirrors and appropriates scientific experimentation methods and history to develop a poetic reflection on the present metamorphoses of natural entities and environments. A particular interest in 19th-century scientific investigations on nature, in which the scientific goals were closely intertwined with aesthetic qualities informs her work. She has produced organic photographs (Solarium, 2004), evoking the early days of photography when Henry Fox Talbot could name his chemical achievements ‘the pencil of nature’ (1844–1846), used chromatography to separate pigments in the color of flowers (Chromatograms, 2002), and made photograms of wavescapes (Clapotis, 2009). The tracing of the wind on paper (Windtracers, 2000), of the movement of animals who share our environments (Tracing Animals, 2005), and of water currents through a bottle equipped with a light (Surf, 2001), are all means to represent the surrounding presence of nature. Närhinen in that respect echoes the work of the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ‘ecology,’ and resorted in his professional practice throughout his lifetime to accomplished drawing skills. Through her studio located on a small island out of Helsinki, her work has been particularly drawn to the sea. The series of sculptural work she has made out of plastic found on the seashore, furthers a research on the impact of human global industrial agency in the 20th century, and the ambiguous beauty that can be found in the all-pervasive outreach of plastic waste on maritime environments. In the following discussion, Närhinen starts by evoking her sculptural series Baltic Sea Plastique (2013), which stems from her interest into plastic pollution. The conversation evokes evolutionary theories, together with the formation of hybrids that our society of consumption taking off in the post-war era has fomented. The dialog moves into a reflection on the parallels between science and the arts, and the construction of reality that these two domains of human activity share in common, beyond the standard division between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction.’ The notion of ‘artifice’ in artistic and scientific production is finally evoked, in considering both the production and modes of presentation of the work. ¹ Gabriel N. Gee

You are working from a little island off the coast of Helsinki, where you have your studio. A lot of your work revolves around this location. Can you tell me about the significance of this space?

Tuula Narhinen

I started working on this island 15 years ago. The city of Helsinki owns a house here where they rent studios to artists. There are 25 artists currently working on the island in this house, with different practices; there are some writers, some visual artists like me. 113The building itself is very special because it was built for the Finnish army to do chemical experiments. It’s not a normal studio space, it has very old rooms, with particular interiors that cannot be changed. For sculpture it can be difficult, as you need to cross the sea every time you go to the studio from Helsinki, and that’s one of the reasons I work with the sea so much. There is a connection boat, but it’s only during summer time. In winter time we need to row or walk on the ice to get there! There are times I can’t go, as the journey finds itself between ice and the open sea beyond. But it gives me a lot of inspiration, because every time I go I practically touch the sea. I get to observe the state of the sea, and so I’ve done a lot of work with marine pollution and plastic.

G.G

One of your sculpture series is entitled Baltic Sea Plastique. It consists of a number of sculptures that you make out of plastic waste found in the sea. It’s quite a recent piece (2013), how did you initiate this work and this reflection on plastic errance? (Figure 7.1)

T.N

I started the project a few years ago. I have a long term research interest into plastic pollution. I did two other works prior to this one about plastic waste, one of which is called Mermaid’s Tears (2007), which is a necklace made out of micro plastic, while the other, Frutti di Mare (2008), is made with bigger plastic detritus. Together they are called The Plastic Ocean. The plastic theme is an important component of my research interest. These works were in the background when I started Baltic Sea Plastique. With Frutti di Mare, I had created sculptures that were placed in an aquarium; then I experimented with the 114floating, how the water carries some parts of the objects, while other parts sink. With this method and the material used I aimed to claim a part of the Helsinki seashores. Not all the plastic components come from the island where I work, as it’s a fairly small island. But I take my bike and I go around the Helsinki seashores, with a big black plastic bag in which I collect trash, which I then bring to the studio to sort it out, according to colours, or textures, whatever inspires me. In Baltic Sea Plastique, I was interested in how the plastic behaves and moves in a way that also captures the attention of sea birds and other animals living in the sea. Plastic is a very strange material, because it imitates the appearance of the jellyfish and other creatures which are part of the sea, which is very unfortunate because then the plastic parts end up in the intestines of birds. One of the points to underline about plastic is that it is a man-made thing which is now really out of our hands. There is a cycle of design, as it’s a very polyvalent material, it can take any shape, it’s a dream material for designers, you can make it thin and strong, and any texture is possible. It’s designed very carefully, it is then consumed, and people then throw it away … It leaks into nature, and then it comes back as trash, and finally an artist puts the bits and pieces together! Of course from the biological point of view, from the nature point of view, the story is really sad, as the material is deceitful. Figure 7.1 Tuula Närhinen, <italic>Baltic Sea Plastique</italic>, 2013 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315538167/36a928e9-ff9b-4e52-8b45-d34da6a5a12e/content/fig7_1_B.jpg"/> courtesy of the artist

G.G

In your accompanying text to Baltic Sea Plastique, while there are allusions to the dramatic aspect of this phenomenon, and to the ecological implications that stem from it, the stress is more significantly on metamorphosis, and processes of historical change that are channelled by the material.

T.N

Correct, I have written more about this aspect in Finnish, as part of my practice-based doctoral thesis at the University of the Arts in Helsinki. In a chapter dedicated to this work, I go as far as framing this metamorphosis as an evolutionary process, and refer to the German 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who made research on very small marine organisms. Haeckel also reflected on the manner through which everything is interconnected in the world. He was a marine biologist. I made a connection with oil, which is the base of plastic, and some of the organisms he was looking at that belong to the same layers in the bottom of the sea. Haeckel made very interesting illustrations related to his research, in particular in Kunstformen der Natur, one of his books, and he also published a lot of popular science books about marine organisms, such as jellyfish. He had theories about their development and evolution which he popularized in Germany. I make a connection between his work and the fantasies of the sea, between oil at the bottom of the sea and our consumption societies, whose dream material is plastic. In a way, plastic pursues the evolution in ‘the forms of nature,’ which as I said is now out of our hands. As once plastic is within nature, it’s not in anybody’s control, and it is metamorphosing in its own in a way that we can’t observe, before coming back to human beings, in some way.

G.G

You suggest that in this process of evolution, plastic becomes an actor. Since we are evoking the relation between art and science, how do you position yourself towards the aesthetics of scientific research, the manner through which these aesthetics play a crucial part in revealing the world to us, but introduce also a bigger issue regarding the importance of ‘representation’ in the sciences?

T.N

115I think visual artists and scientist are both trying to face the unknown, and that is a common point. But there is also a connecting point in the methods, particularly in the visual methods; many scientists use visual methods. Haeckel for example could draw very well, he was a very good draughtsman, and some of his theories are based on how he saw the world, for instance how embryos develop. He drew the images himself, which is a little unusual as a scientist at that time might have preferred to employ an artist to do the illustrations. But what I am saying is that it’s more than illustrating, it’s a mode of investigating reality, and there is a common thing in the visual arts and in science here. I am also thinking of Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenotechnique, which is a kind of ontological method; it’s not only a form of visualization, which to me is like illustrating something, it’s how in a laboratory with a range of instruments, you make the phenomena materialize. The method is also a result, as the research and the result are interconnected in an ontological production, with often some visual trace of some kind. I am especially interested in how natural sciences integrate these traces.

G.G

Your work plays upon an understanding of science not as a mere reflection of reality, but as a construction of reality. In exploring traces, you have also made pieces that aim to represent a form of writing in nature, a writing by the wind (Windtracers, 2000) and by the waves (Surf, 2001). These explorations parallel an interest in early photography, photography as light writing, or The Pencil of Nature, to refer to the famous publication by Henry Fox Talbot.

T.N

Yes, in Solarium (2004) for instance I explore writing with light as a chemical process. To me photography is also a method of the natural sciences. That’s why I mention the word traces too, because I am mostly working with analogue techniques, for practical reasons, and because I work outside. I mean I have nothing against digital techniques, it’s a question of methods. As a lot of my work has to do with observation, and reporting, mostly outdoors, analogue photography provides a significant medium.

G.G

In terms of presentation, how do you decide on the mode of display? In Frutti di Mare for instance, you used photographs as well as rows of plastic containers in which the sculptures bathed in water, for Mermaid’s Tears, you presented a necklace made of plastic pellets, and next to it you had installed plinths supporting collections of pellets and detritus, which were sorted and presented through a series of sieves.

T.N

I usually try to be a bit didactic. I want to give the spectator the possibility of understanding where the images come from. That’s one of the reasons for showing the method and the apparatus that made the images. In the Animal Cameras (Animalcams, 2002), in which I explore the way in which different animals see the world, I showed the pinhole camera (the sténopé) I used to produce the images, together with the result, the photographic material that resulted from the dispositif. With this idea of phenomenotechnique, the aim is to show a whole cycle, from production to representation. Maybe the spectator sometimes might not understand the connection, but it doesn’t matter, it’s part of the work. And the methods are as important as the result, to me: the processes have to be shown. It’s done in different ways, sometimes it’s videos, sometimes it’s the instrument, and sometimes all of them!

G.G

116Your practice connects the activities of the artist and the scientist. In the past, these two activities and modes of thinking about the world, which are often seen as divergent, could be bound in revealing fashion. In the history of early maritime representation for instance, artists were instrumental in bringing to the fore the representation of nature, and could be linked to geography and scientific mapmaking. You have an interest for the representation of the natural world, and the emergence of facts. As such, the attention to processes leads to a reflection on the artifice, and ‘artificial memories.’ The leftovers made of plastic carry with them a narrative of interconnected history, that somehow bridges the gap between nature and the artifice: the plastic is the archetypal artificial material produced by men’s industrial activities, but is ambiguously redeemed in its return to the sea, to the natural environment, where it pursues its own species’ evolution.

T.N

I have been writing a bit about Catherine Malabou, who uses the term ‘plasticité’ in the very general sense of the plasticity of the brain, and the same goes with plastic itself, it is malleable to a certain point, it depends on how the plastic objects are made, they can take any shape, but once it’s done, the shape is more or less set, some plastic you can melt and reform, but some of them stay as such, and carry with them the shape that was given to them. I experienced this aspect first hand, as I had to mechanically put these plastics together. I also tried to melt them with an iron, but I often failed as they don’t really stick together, and I had to use mechanical connections. Something similar applies metaphorically, in relation to evolution and how the material behaves.

With reference to the optical instruments, the notion of artifice is very negative. The artifice is something that the instrument produces, a biproduct that is not real. And to some extent any research product contains an artificial character. And the whole instrument can be understood as an artifice. For example in the work I did on the River Senne in Brussels, I used a very poor kind of toy microscope. What it produced was a lot of artifice, because of the chromatic aberration of the lens. The objects I was looking at were surrounded by colours that did not belong to the object, they were an artifice of the lenses, and I recorded those artifices very meticulously in my watercolour paintings. I was as much interested in the artifice that the instrument produced, as I was in the real optical image, thereby investigating the role of technology in trans-forming reality.

G.G

The idea of ‘the artifice’ plays a mediating role, as an image or a metaphor, rather than an essence of artificiality to be opposed to the ‘natural.’ The categories of ‘artifice’ and ‘nature’ are explored through the way they are constructed, created.

T.N

Haeckel somehow understood this, Kunstformen der Natur was very influential in the field of design, and architecture of the time. It’s a romantic idea, the creating nature.

G.G

In the Amos Anderson Art museum, I saw a tapestry by Greta Skogster-Lehtinen (1900–1994) depicting the harbour of Helsinki, a very large and modern design from the 1930s. The natural landscape depicted in this tapestry within which Helsinki dwells, is, however, being colonized by urban extensions. Similarly, you have explored the progress of asphalts in an early work, Ulysses in Helsinki (1999), in which you mapped the extension of Helsinki 117towards the sea, that brought islands to become attached to the mainland. You are pursuing this strand in combination with your interest in plastic through an attention to the city’s current underwater expansion, through the recuperation of underbelly explosives.

T.N

Presently the cities of Helsinki and Espoo are building a new underground line, which requires exploding the rock, then they ship the rest into the sea. They use this explosive plastic substance, in bits and pieces between the gravel. It’s been much discussed in the press, as it’s a new form of plastic pollution. I’m using the anti-slip plastic mats as a support structure. I use a crochet technique. There is a very specific Finnish tapestry tradition, called, ‘ryijy,’ or Finnish rugs that were woven by peasant women in the 19th century. The rugs were used on the walls for isolation, as well as decoration. The tapestry you referred to evokes this anonymous tradition of Finnish rugs, as it was revisited by textile artists, women as well, and yes you could say I am also revisiting the tradition! I’m not using only bags, but I also collect pieces of ropes, and pieces of plastic shock tube detonator that is used in exploding the rock. I’m planning to weave and to crochet these bags to make a romantic seascape, in a Turner style, sunset on the sea!