Art House RaumArs 4.4.-3.5.2025
Small Shifts is the fourteenth joint exhibition by the three visual artists. Comprising textile artworks, color paper cutouts, and video installations, the exhibition explores themes such as relationships with loved ones, nature, and culture. The group has been working together since 2018, and each exhibition emerges as a unique whole shaped by its venue and chosen theme.
Leena Illukan (b. 1962) Leena Illukka’s collage-like works unfold as temporal palimpsests, where layers of past and present are interwoven. Illukka works with repurposed wall textiles as her foundation, deconstructing, mending, and reassembling the material, and hand-embroidering over the original imagery to imbue it with new layers of meaning. Her works evoke humanity, memories, imagination, and forgotten emotions. Illuka's main technique is embroidery, which she uses in sculpture, photography and multi-part textile series.
Illukka graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Art Institute and has a Master's degree in Fine Arts from Saimaa University of Applied Sciences. In 2023, she was awarded an additional state artist's pension. Illukka's works are in Finnish and foreign museums and collections.
In Silja Puranen’s (b. 1961) video installation the destructive relationship between humans and their environment merges with an ageless longing for beauty. The starting point is the problematic material of our time—plastic—whose inherent tendency for imitation, rooted in its cultural history, recurs and accumulates in the work on various levels. The visual inspiration behind the pieces is the aesthetics of plastic, kitsch, camp, and a DIY attitude. In her career, Puranen has worked with textiles, digital image, video and animation.
Puranen graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Art Institute and holds a Master of Arts from Aalto University. Her works are in several Finnish and foreign museums and collections. In 2009, Puranen was awarded the Nordic Award in Textiles, the largest prize in Nordic textile art. In 2023, Puranen was awarded an additional state artist's pension.
In her works, Virpi Vesanen-Laukkanen portrays life with grandchildren and their families. The color paper cutouts are tenderly rendered portraits of loved ones. Her latest works explore closeness and how we need one another. The velvety soft sculptures gently and humorously address time, change, and aging. The artworks draw inspiration from surrealism and everyday life, where small movements are constantly taking place. Vesanen-Laukkanen is a textile and visual artist who interprets myths and imagery related to women's lives. She cuts paper, reuses materials to make reliefs, sews costume sculptures from caramel paper and soft toys from fabric.
Vesanen-Laukkanen has a Master of Arts degree. She was named Ornamo's Artist of the Year in 2008 and was awarded an additional state artist's pension in 2023. Her works are in museums and collections in Finland and abroad.
EN 
FI