Bio
The past fifteen years Sirpa Jokinen has as a visual artist mainly used sound connecting it to images and also used video and installation as her medium.
In her art images are directly related to sound and are connected to certain location that they describe.
There were two video projections and an object installation at the last exhibition at the HIAP Gallery Augusta in November 2025 in Helsinki. The Lake Light video projection consists of landscape scenes at the bottom of a lake filmed using chance operation. The sound is recorded with equipment built by herself.
As a sound artist she has made solo performances but also performed with various line-ups that improvise. Sirpa Jokinen uses as her sound source a sequencer, electronic instruments she has built herself, objects amplified with contact microphones, traditional instruments, field-recordings and vocals. The performances are based on experiments with timbre and rhythm with layered polyphony. They belong to the genre of experimental music and sound art.
She has played among others with the Helsinki Improvisers Orchestra (2023-), Synthestra the synthesizer orchestra led by Jimi Tenor (live performance of the Cantus Arcticus by Rautavaara at the YLE TV1 2021),with a quartet at the Other Stage at the Flow festival (2019) and as the Brutou Dou duo with Katja Lamberg (2022-). She has performed with Aleksei Borisov at the Noise and Fury Festival in Moscow and in a trio at the Music of the present festival in St. Petersburg (2015).
Albums: Deep Tunnel, Brutou Dou (Artsy records 2023), Windy Why (Artsy Records 2021), Motor Stories (self-published 2015), NO-GO-ZONE, influence 100, sound art compilation DVD (2008, Englanti), Sounds of Dripping Water, sound art compilation (Alan Dunn 2008), Arts Council England
The composition for flute, clarinet, piano and cello: Matkakertomuksia, Ruostesiipiperhosentoukka ja Nelitäpläpirkko, (performed by Defunensemble at the Musiikkitalo March 4th. 2024) contains videos of the movements of the insects and its sound. The quartet improvise imitating these movement sounds.
In the installation Sounds Of The Frozen Lake 2010 at the Sinerbrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki the visual elements created the timbre of its sound. The voice coils attached to these elements made them resonate according to their material nature (large glass plate, wooden panel, subwoofer) as sound was supplied to them.
Take A Winter Walk In The Garden With Jean Jacques Rousseau 2009 was a soundwalk piece. The visitor got to listen when walking at the outside area of the Kaisaniemi Botanical Gardens in Helsinki direction instructions and field recordings from that place but also excerpts from Rousseau's book Reveries Of A Solitary Walker. The field recordings for the piece were recorded in January including sounds among other things from an ice rink, dripping water from icicles and foot steps on snow. The sound walk was available for participation in August the following summer.
The Places, Sounds, Words project in 2005 at the Mission 17 Gallery in San Francisco presented 25 places with soundscape chosen by participating people in Moscow and San Francisco. The visitor to the exhibition got to listen to these soundscapes with the person chosen it describing what was happening there at the moment. There were also photograph enlargements of the person at her chosen place. The work aimed to show intimate relationships people have to certain places meaningful to them.
