Inspiration and Necessity

Dr. Decker recently put out a table of books and copies of sculpture magazines free to a good home. I raided the table and got a ton of the sculpture magazines and I am so glad I did. Today I decided to flip through one of them and saw pictures of trees and stopped immediately to read the article. If you want to get my attention, put a picture of a tree in front of me and immediately I will stop what I am doing.

This article turned out to be about Oranki Art Park, a sculpture park in Finland. It talks about how artists who come and do installations in the park enjoy it “because it’s a peaceful and quiet place, and you can make anything you feel. It’s good to do things outside institutions— you can forget the rules of working in a studio.” This quote really stuck with me as it made me consider how in individual practice it is good to get away from what you are working on to extras yourself artistically in nature. For me personally this is really important as often times I haves labored over a project and then once I was done with it I hated it so much because I spent too much time on that piece and not enough time out in nature. It is also really important for me as often my art has themes revolving around nature and I get my inspiration from nature.

The article also talks about the formation of the park and how it arose out of necessity as in Finland artists have to pay ridiculous amounts to exhibit in galleries and so they fled to the outdoors and now artist groups all over Finland have outdoor art events. So with the creation of the park artist's were not only given the opportunity to leave their studio space, but also the gallery. I find this idea really inspiring.