Kirsi Jaakkola
Basic information
b. 1977, Karvia
Visual Artist (MA)
Residence: Kankaanpää
Contact information
Email: kirsi.jaakkola@gmail.com
Artist’s Statement
My art is strongly rooted in everyday issues. My conceptualisation of the mundane slides through personal experience and connects in particular with themes of war, captivity, refugeeism and the sound environment. In many of my artworks, the visual subjects are related to plants, the built or natural landscape. My artworks are linked to the local environment and emerge from private experience as the more common statements.
Grey. An ordinary day. Cooking, looking for things, reading the daily newspaper, laundry, news, hugs, cuddling and sleeping. At home. At rest. Ordinary and simple. In the meantime; work, friends, smiles, worries, and cry. Passion. Watching TV, disappointments, vacuum cleaning, and love confessions. What ever. Daily and grey. Simultaneously, all of it, worth of achieving.
I am fond of the low keys in grey, its humble thereness. Grey adjusts and comforts itself while painting it, without letting me go. Not easily taken. While invert and secretive, it carries the potential of all that is colourful. Grey provides the opposites with glory, while remaining sensitive in the context of changes and effects by any environment. The inexplicable keeps capturing, investing my energy in grey.
The movement of expression between the representational and the abstract takes everyday stories to a more complex level of experience, where beneath the ordinary grayness or seemingly carefree colorfulness, one can also discern things that are hidden, lost, or silenced in everyday life. Nevertheless, everyday life is often perceived through constant routine or repetition. Can ordinariness be a subject, and where are the boundaries between meaningfulness, interest, and the public and private spheres?
What is grey for me does not necessarily represent grey to any other person. To me, the contact with grey is true and consciously created by the contexts of the everyday. Both of them, the colour and the daily, possess what is valuable – for me – to work on by cherishing it. My intention is not to glorify what is mundane; the unbearable, the inescapable. The daily grey, like every day, is proper to each other, accordingly. To me, it is like painting, breathing, the necessity in order to keep myself in my senses.
Grey. An ordinary day. Cooking, looking for things, reading the daily newspaper, laundry, news, hugs, cuddling and sleeping. At home. At rest. Ordinary and simple. In the meantime; work, friends, smiles, worries, and cry. Passion. Watching TV, disappointments, vacuum cleaning, and love confessions. What ever. Daily and grey. Simultaneously, all of it, worth of achieving.
I am fond of the low keys in grey, its humble thereness. Grey adjusts and comforts itself while painting it, without letting me go. Not easily taken. While invert and secretive, it carries the potential of all that is colourful. Grey provides the opposites with glory, while remaining sensitive in the context of changes and effects by any environment. The inexplicable keeps capturing, investing my energy in grey.
The movement of expression between the representational and the abstract takes everyday stories to a more complex level of experience, where beneath the ordinary grayness or seemingly carefree colorfulness, one can also discern things that are hidden, lost, or silenced in everyday life. Nevertheless, everyday life is often perceived through constant routine or repetition. Can ordinariness be a subject, and where are the boundaries between meaningfulness, interest, and the public and private spheres?
What is grey for me does not necessarily represent grey to any other person. To me, the contact with grey is true and consciously created by the contexts of the everyday. Both of them, the colour and the daily, possess what is valuable – for me – to work on by cherishing it. My intention is not to glorify what is mundane; the unbearable, the inescapable. The daily grey, like every day, is proper to each other, accordingly. To me, it is like painting, breathing, the necessity in order to keep myself in my senses.
Current information
Exhibitions in 2026:ECHO | Tila Gallery, Helsinki (August, group exhibition)
FOUR STATES OF WATER | Kubu Cultural Center, Kemiönsaari (October–November, solo exhibition)
Forest Rights Project
I work as a visual artist in the Forest Rights project at the University of Tampere, which is funded by the Kone Foundation's Metsän puolella (On the Side of the Forest) initiative.
