Kaarina Kaikkonen

Something Out of Nothing

The Sixth Borough

Kaarina Kaikkonen’s art transcends the disciplinary boundaries between sculpture, installation and architecture for in essence, they emanate from the personal dictates of her body and memory.  Says the artist, “I have built countless works and installations, mostly straight into their spaces. Through my work I try to search my constantly changing outline. I need an outline to understand myself more clearly – to understand where the internal ends and the external begins.”

In her installation for The Sixth Borough, Hiding Memories, a table submerged in men’s shirts, Kaikkonen partly refers to a personal childhood memory, when she hid under the kitchen table when her father was dying, too frozen by fear to call for help. But the work also tells about the world of women, confined to the kitchen, to the laundry, washing all the shirts of the governors, wives subsuming their own ambitions to support the work of their husbands so they can be “Governors” in the wider world as well as at home. The work is a testament to all this unheralded sacrifice, “Behind every great man is a greater woman.”

The Queen of the Night (2005)
In Something Out of Nothing, the history, sounds and textures of the streets are summoned in the recycled shoes of Kaarina Kaikkonen that recall the “presence of absence”.