The Margin-to-Margin project has enabled me to work with communities through both socially engaged art and site-specific art. My personal projects have focused on creating action and intervention in Namibia, South Africa, and Finland. It’s been interesting to notice that art can generate action and truly develop a sense of community.

Creating interventions in specific locations was one of my strong topics. In South Africa in Kimberley and Upington I created social sculptures with two San youth communities connected with PARTY (Participatory Development with Youth) -project during 2016-2017. In these locations, we worked on addressing social challenges, self-expression, and sharing your views with your local community through posters. This action was very site-specific, focusing on expressing your opinion to community members in Platfontein and the Rosedale local communities. In these interventions, the focus was on the prevention of abuse and respecting San identities and cultures. This intervention took place on the local neighbourhood street. The action included preparing posters together and distributing them in the neighbourhood.

Two other site-specific projects were around sustainability issues through plants. The first project took place in Hancock, Michigan, where the local American-Finnish community collaborated on creating an installation featuring plants and digitally printed textiles. This project was part of the Moved by Nature exhibition at Finlandia University Gallery. The other project, which involved plants and taking care of them, was a Winter Garden exhibition at Lapland University’s Lyhty Gallery. This focused on taking care of plants during the polar night. University community members could bring their plants for care during the extended Christmas holidays. This created discussion about plants and how to organise care, such as watering for them, and what kind of relationships have been developed through this. People have many stories and memories about their plants. These site-specific projects were more about creating a feeling of community in a specific place, such as the American-Finnish community or the Lapland University community, through a common topic.

The third project where I worked with plants was a textile installation called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” which was exhibited at the Vaasa Art Museum and Arktikum in Rovaniemi. This installation was an outcome of a series of workshops with school children and workshop participants felting flowers. The flowers together created a beautiful field of flowers. This process will continue at an exhibition in Port Augusta, Australia, and hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to continue with the flower field later on. This installation included a QR code that led to Vimeo, where you could listen to the stories the children talked about the flowers they felt. Children were tasked with making all the different flowers grow together to promote tolerance and variety.

Empowerment and artist identities were topics I was exploring in two of my personal projects. The first one was a process where I met and interviewed women artists from Namibia and Finland to create a circle of women artists, reflecting on their identities and how they represented their positions in geographic margins, both in the far north and the far south. This was created by combining photographs with the artist’s written comments about their positioning as an artist. This circle of women was exhibited in Helinä Rautavaara Museum’s exhibition “Margin to Margin.” Creating a circle of women also involved connecting a circle of women with a string of yarn. This intervention took place with women of the Penduka project in Namibia. This is a collective of women with physical challenges working in textile production and tourism. I had a short morning workshop with the Penduka women, who shared their ideas, feelings, and opinions about their dreams and challenges. We wrote our dreams and challenges in post-it notes that were attached to a piece of string and circled through. Women read each other’s notes. This made us think about collective challenges and ways to overcome these. Working with circles of women focused firmly on the theme of empowerment and identity. Women’s identities are focused on coping, caring, self-expression, as well as having a strong vision and mission to look forward to.