Sadet Hirsimäki



︎Muskox wool  ︎Qiviut



Sadet Hirsimäki is a Helsinki based artist who works with pictures, painting and writes poems. They also have curatorial practice. In their work Sadet creates a dialogue between different characters' life happenings and the stories effect on artist themself. Their work combines child-like semi-animals with an echo of darkness featuring charged emotions.

Sadet spent the month of September in Ilulissat Greenland at Arctic Culture Lab. There they got to know the local culture, materials, the surrounding nature and its might. 

They connected with a material and its origin, the wool of a musk ox. The month was spent researching the material and facing the emotions that a complex geographic location generates. This made them have a new perspective with the space and materials.




   




"Deep-ecology and eco-fetisism. Fear of spirits, fear of the giant animals, fear of the Sassuma Arnaa (Mother of the Sea), reverence towards the Angakkuq (Inuit Shaman). I am surrounded by this culture of mixture of modernisation and ancient folklore and wisdom, in this special part of Nunarput, this icy island named as 'Greenland' by colonizer, Denmark.

I am terrified and practicing sincering my soul out during the one month residency...Settling in, respecting out, day-by-day listening and undoing my urge to push my own artworks that I have suddenly no clue how to make them and fill them with something real or important. Decolonizing my art practice? May be. Very important, at last.

Angakkuq kindly directed me to my helper animal, white yak ox, that she saw in the shamanic healing ritual. I imagine the white yak walking side by side with me everyday when I feel uneven and the challenges of self-direction hit me. Medicines, and white yak ox smiling besides me, long fur waving in the wind, the horns glisten in the arctic sunlight. Angakkuq's narrative-like images shown to me through spirit world through her, lead my way to continue, or showing the ways to step back and maybe hide in the dugouts, give others space.

I have been drawing pictures (with different paints and pencils) into emotionally charged objects, especially beds, during few years now. I felt urge to paint into an old used bed also in Ilulissat. The reverence, different ways of sorting out trash including old furnitures, and respecting privacy of people, I ended up only writing my notes, poems and painting on old used canvases every Wednesday in painting-assemblage. Those pictures were the images of these fearful, esteem spiritual beliefs that I may have found during my stay and to be continued with in the future. As previous pentecostal person who've been struggling with the lack of the magic of the believe, it is a great gift from an artistic residency period."


                            — Sadet Hirsimäki










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