Finnish artist Marianne Huotari creates a lush dreamlike world through her intricately layered ceramic wall tapestries and sculptures.
She spent a year preparing six new pieces for her first US solo show, Voyage. These works and more are now on view at HB381, Scandinavian-focused gallery Hostler Burrows’s Lower Manhattan exhibition space, through October 31.
Huotari often uses a title as a starting point in her process. For this show, the work became about a sense of place, with works titled By the Waterfall, Night in the Arboretum, and Tree of Tales. “It’s about going somewhere, being somewhere,” she says. “That’s the voyage.”
Working from her studio at Helsinki’s Arabia Art Department Society, Huotari makes various shapes and sizes of clay beads by hand, often leaving visible fingerprints. She colors the clay with pigments or glazes before firing them multiple times and sewing the pieces together. Inspired by Finnish hand-knotted rya rugs—a centuries-old traditional style characterized by a long thick wool pile—Huotari then weaves together thousands of these individual clay beads to create richly textured sculptures.
It’s painstaking work. The 5-by-10-foot “wall rug” By the Waterfall, which Huotari created for the exhibition, took about six months to complete. “You may not know how it’s made when you look at it, but I hope the viewer can see the time and dedication,” she says. “For me, it’s a very meditative process.”
For the wall pieces, she follows a loose sketch and works from the bottom up, binding each element with thin brass wire. With their single attachment point, the beads hang freely and can sway slightly.
Huotari builds her freestanding sculptures intuitively. She often begins without much more of a plan than the colors she wants to use or a new technique to try. With beads sorted by shape and color laid out in her studio, Huotari attaches each petal, leaf, or rod to an aluminum mesh that she shapes as she goes.
The results, on display at HB381, are both familiar and otherworldly. In Verdant Daydreamer, layered green petals and tassels of pink, purple, and orange beads suggest a garment draped over a dressmaker’s form, topped with a budding flower. Suspended from the ceiling, Whisper of Mystique evokes an insect nest, softened by shades of rose and trailing yellow tendrils.
“For me, it’s expressing my inner world. Some may call it naive, but I call it happy and hopeful,” Huotari says. “I want to offer people some beauty in their surroundings and also a bit of escapism.”