Elina Mirjam Länsman (Sipilä)

Basic information

b. 1979, Oulu
Visual Artist
Residence: Nuorgam

Contact information

Phone number: +358 44 526 1979

Artist’s Statement

The tension between nature and culture represents the ambivalence in Elina Sipilä’s works. Inherited from philosophic and artistic tradition, she is enriched from her journeys, from her reflexions, from her fascination for the far North and indigenous cultures.

Elina pictures a mysterious and tumultuous river between two opposite banks. On one side the call of nature, on the other the impossibility to merge into it without the loss of what makes us human: our self-consciousness and our thoughts. Mysterious is our identity and the world around us. Such mystery represents an unstable and sometimes painful harmony.

From the metaphysical loneliness to the physical loneliness, here is where a sensitive consciousness arises. Between the coldness and hardness of a rock, the warmth of a home, and the wild landscapes where silence is thick and almost mineral. An inside and an outside, combining themselves, answering each other, opposing one another. Elina Sipilä’s work is driven by these conflicing relations, like an intimate wound, seeking reconciliation.

Far from political issues, from global distress, from style, stars and artistic «coups», there is much to learn about her creations. To find out the meaning, to rediscover the silence and the intimate mystery which we are made up of and surrounded by. Romanticism looses its lyricism but not its power. Against the tyranny of reason and theory, against the victory of technique and progress, Elina Sipilä’s work helps us take a deep breath and invites us to a spiritual and persistently comtemplative journey.

Sébastien Toda, Diploma in Philosophy
Show biography

Current information

The name Elina Sipilä has changed to Elina Länsman.

Bio

Elina Sipilä (b. 1979, Oulu, Finland) represents a new generation of lithograph artists in Finland. After receiving her Master of Arts degree, complemented with a number of additional credits, she has spent a couple of highly influential residence periods abroad. (The Sami Art Center in the Norwegian Lapland and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris) The axis of North and South, together with the longing for new and yearning back to the beginning, define the horizon of Elina’s pictures that portray her experiences of nature, landscape and topography.

The washed look achieved with the lithography technique combines with lines that appear to both search and find, expressing the artist’s powerful inner sense of nature. Longing gives birth to the nearest and dearest. The picture named ‘Runo’ portraying a young female reindeer was made in Paris. The lichen-green picture of this arctic animal includes everything that the artist, then living in France, longed for back home in the North.The art finds and the artist lives and cares. The longing for love makes one to grow and see more. Elina Sipilä’s artist’s heart hosts a beautifully sheltered flame. Her most recent exhibition was at the Kaliningrad X biennale of the Baltic area countries 2011.

Kuutti Lavonen 2012