Jeans
A public artwork installation for Merituuli Kindergarten, Herttoniemi, Helsinki 2002, ordered by Helsinki Art Museum. The work consists of four separate parts all made of used jeans. Used jeans were collected from flea markets as the surface material for the piece. The collected jeans were divided into five groups based on the blue value. Pieces are Jeans Design, Jeans Faces, Jeans Eggs and For Sleeping.
Jeans Design is 7m long piece on the wall of kindergarten’s hall. The form of the work comes from earlier installation artwork “Design”, which was changed from three-dimensional to two-dimensional. All the works were sewed by using typical seam used in jeans. The sewing work was done by professional seamstress Tarja Ruippo. See also another installation artwork where the color blue plays a large role, Pulses in Blue from 2023. See Jeans in Helsinki Art Museum Collection
Why jeans as a material for a work of art ?
When I visited the kindergarten under construction, I noticed that the color orange had a large share in the wall surfaces. At first I sketched different subjects to paint but I didn’t think they worked with the strong orange…so I turned my attention to materials. The blue contrast of the orange color of the jeans came to my mind, perhaps because that year jeans were seen a lot in the street scene, they had come back into fashion after several years of black and gray pants. The orange of a typical denim seam thread is close to the shade of a nursery wall. It was also important that jeans blue has a wide range of shades from light to dark.
What are jeans eggs ?
Jeans eggs are a series of several egg-shaped sculptures of different sizes covered with denim fabric that are part of the installation. Jeans eggs are placed freely around the kindergarten Merituuli, children can carry them from place to place as part of their play. The denim material visually ties the works to the parts of the work hung on the walls and evokes ideas related to play and visuality. The egg-shaped light sculpture is easy to carry and the shape is also symbolic.
What are jeans faces ?
Jeans Faces are a group of round fabrics of different sizes sewn from denim fabric showing a simplified face shape attached to the walls of kindergarten Merituuli. The size of the parts representing the eyes, nose and mouth of the jeans faces, as well as the contours of the face, varies. These blank faces offer young children the opportunity to build a story around them.
Miika Nyyssönen also uses materials in an unconventional way in his series Cardboard Sculptures
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