I recently found myself lost in the pages of a glorious exhibition catalog titled DESIGNED FOR DELIGHT: Alternative Aspects of Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts (Flammarion, 1997) which documents a traveling exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts. In the section “Inversion and Transformation,” a beautiful and evocative photograph of a necklace by Finnish artist Janna Syvanoja entitled “Books” (1990) mesmerized me. The necklace captures the experience of viewing a row of books with gilt edges from above. There is a lyrical simplicity to it all. She isolates one aspect of our experience of the book and revels in its possibilities. “I did not want to respect only written knowledge,” says Syvanoja in the brief artist’s statement, “but also the knowledge of how to make paper from wood, to bind a book. It was also respect for curiosity to see existing things in a new way.”
Syvanoja’s art frequently incorporates and transforms printed materials into graceful and hauntingly beautiful organic forms. In her art, she visually captures a place where the printed world and the natural world intersect in an intriguing, even startling, symbiosis. Her approach may be highly selective, even minimal, but the result is complex and deeply resonant.
The Charon Kransen Arts website offers both a full record of this extraordinary artist’s career along with an artist’s statement where she further elaborates on her use of written texts to pattern her pieces and its specific relationship to jewelry.
You can also view images of other pieces that she has created there.
–Charles Seluzicki