HB381 is pleased to announce Voyage, a solo exhibition of new works by Marianne Huotari (Finnish, b. 1986). Huotari's meticulously beaded sculptures and wall tapestries reimagine traditional Finnish rya long-pile textiles. Although primarily a ceramicist in practice, textile design is Huotari’s métier; through a care-intensive process of craftsmanship the artist sculpts hundreds of oblong ceramic beads, rounded medallions, and crimped petals by hand before affixing them to a metal armature with wire.
Each sculptural work begins as though in the workshop of a couturier with Huotari’s vast array of beads carefully sorted by shape, size, and tonality. These are arranged into elaborate compositional patterns and sculpted bas-reliefs. Much like a dressmaker’s mannequin, steel armatures stand at the ready as Huotari fastens each ceramic bead into the matrix of her work. The resulting tessellated and layered surfaces are at times reminiscent of the colorful paisleys and hypnotic patterning of the 1970s, at others hewing closer to the decorative arts of the rococo or art nouveau periods.
For her first solo exhibition with HB381, Huotari has gathered a broad range of references from the botanical to the sartorial and the carnivalesque, reading allegories of the natural world through the lens of oneiric and at times retro, psychedelia-infused imagery. Her expansive wall works, Night in the Arboretum and By the Waterfall (her largest to date), offer shifting visions of lush gardens fluctuating amid fields of pattern and color. Their enveloping and tightly-packed compositions nod to the DIY aesthetics of the 1970s counterculture while applying an haute couture level of handwork. These densely-packed terrains of unmediated color relay a joyful allegory of abundance and expansiveness. The emotional tenor of her works is unceasingly euphoric, oracular, and full of wonder.