Sofi Häkkinen
Fisting Forest
Those lumps that form on bald willow trees, with a bunch of small branches sticking out of them, always look like fists. The wet black outlines are drawn against the concrete sky, hard and strange and sharp. When you look at hands you don’t have to look in the eye. Hands reveal more, because when something breaks, you can’t touch the same way again. I’ve held hands and ripped things apart by hand, I’ve poked with a finger, I’ve dried and moistened by hand. The hand is gentle and presses and squeezes and caresses and then it goes into a fist. When you look at hands you look at everything they’ve ever done. In a way, they have the whole soul and life of a human being in one piece of the body? What have those hands done and what will they do next???? I made this work with my hands. Doing something with hands is such a mindless event. It’s intuitive and unconscious, it’s so basic and you do it all the time constantly every day. You don’t even realise you’re doing anything until your hand is a fist. Hands concentrating like hell on making some huge super precise effort and the veins tighten and the tendons stretch at the same time coordinated touching, fisting, holding I need to touch this you need to see this and hands react to each other one does this the other responds immediately you don’t even think about it your thoughts are visible in your hands and hands are tied together with zip ties and left there
About the artist
Sofi Häkkinen (b.1990) works with sculpture, performance and video. Häkkinen’s art explores the interfaces of horror, corporeality and sentimentality, which they approach through a process of building and dismantling that mixes humour, death and kitsch. Wood, ready-made, metal and found materials form the physical skeleton of the works. Häkkinen’s art draws its strength from queer thinking, and honesty about motifs and materials.
