The Skin Remembers It All
We grow older every year, with every hour and minute . Experiences, touches, joys and sorrows are stored in our senses, our being, our skin, our body while being etched into our attitudes towards life. What kind of relationship do we have with ourselves and our close ones? Can we take care of others as well as ourselves? If we can change and develop then how? Where should the strength come from?
I have been always inspired by great women, some of them more than 30 years older than me. Some of them are conceptually involved in this exhibition and some of them can be seen on the photographs depicting hands – three women are passed away in their 90s but they were never mentally old.
Exhibition The Skin Remembers it All is about women, their vitality and interconnectedness. One of the elements to express these ideas is the network connecting women and their activities, best visible in the knitwork applied on the bookshelf. Decades ago during the days of our mothers and grandmothers it was quite common that women knitted clothes for the whole family. I still have garments knitted by my mother or those that I have knitted for my father or husband or daughter. It feels so good when such self-made a garment is next to your skin. The women of our community still knit a lot and every year I get something new added to my wardrobe. The scanned knitwork have been placed onto the shelf as the so-called roll books equipped with labels.
When working with the sky atlas I was thinking of our predecessors and ancestors. When I was half younger than I am now, my mother became ill and faded away underneath my eyes. This was one of the deepest existential experiences in my life – day by day, the seemingly invisible network was being cut off, the one connecting me to my foremothers, the so-called bloodline. I have written the names of the important women in my life as rolls inside of a book object.
The main installation in the back room of the gallery has been inspired by the rituals practised among the women in our community, one of these being a full moon sauna. The rotating partings are just like compasses that we need to keep awake in order not to get lost on our road.
Current exhibition reflects my perception of life at the present moment – it is a conceptual continuation to the similar exhibition “29 ½” held 25 years ago, and this is expressed through the twenty nine and a half drawings exposed on the wall of the back room. Another hint is given by the nest that is filled with the twigs collected underneath the birch trees next to my home, the twigs that have falled during one full circle of the year – the netword of nature where I consider to be more and more important to blend in.
Eve Kask
November 1, 2022