Anna Penttilä
Haapavesi (1991)
Nearby the centre of Kirkkonummi you can find a small, dilapidated Art Cottage, rented by Artists’ association. It´s the home of their summer exhibitions, and Anna Penttilä’s Nukkavierumetsä forest has been built on its outskirts.
The colourful path of the concrete tiles winds through the trees along the path of love, where the most bizarre and strange figure stare timidly and regretfully at this existence, defiantly and blatantly displayed, and the joyful personal texts and quotes on the signs declare not only love, but the gospel of acceptance, safety, family and care. Works such as Giant Poop, Jänkhäs-Tiina, consisting of a broken record player, a humidifier and an office chair, Nappigalleria, The Sad Tycoon and Homeboy rest in the forest among signs, rhymes and thoughtful phrases proclaiming strangeness and love.
“Rose travels on a rocket.
The trip is stressful for the rose.
Rose found a traveler.
But the traveler was a mirror.”
–Helmi
The theme of upcycling is obvious. Abandoded barbie dolls have resulted in two works, legs with broken legs crammed into a hole inside the frame, and a circle framed by ghostly beautiful loose heads and, interspersed with oval-shaped fur lines, small Barbie hands trying to dig out. Anna Penttilä says she used to play with Barbie when she was little. In the plot of the play, she was a beautiful Barbie who met a lovely man and had romantic games with him.
Penttilä has no art education, and hardly any. She was born in 1991 in a small municipality of Haapavesi in Finland, to a family where her father was unable to work and at home due to polio, and mother worked with children and young people in the parish. Mom enjoyed making art and liked exhibitions. Penttilä says he was a difficult child who hated school. By the third grade, she hadn’t wanted to wake up or go to school at all. She was afraid of death, and could not get to the clipcorrectly included. School subjects were disgusting.
In the end, a large part of his school time was spent in the hospital, where Penttilä underwent endless examinations, such as black spot tests. The rest of the time, she eventually went to school from the family home, completing elementary school. The diagnosis was ADD.
But what it comes to making music and art, Penttilä doesn’t feel wrong or different in any way. A difficult school history dotted with ink marks from life and hospitalizations has left imprint to her, that comes through the works and their furiously strange existence.
The memory of the inkblot tests “just sucks” flutters inside the frames now in an art exhibition, the feel-good toilet is embroidered with orange and red pots and instagram accounts like Kuvia Karin Kullista and Masentunut tonttu filled with digital art, and a self-made wind chime park in the middle of the forest in Haapavesi, a very personal way of looking at the world and creating characters all settle to the same spiritual home.
Although Penttilä has not received any education in making art, she has studied music making at colleges, met his future spouse during her studies in Paimio and moved to Kirkkonummi. Now, in addition to the teacher-spouse and two children, the family includes a grain snake named Misva, a strenuous parrot O’Sullivan a.k.a “bird”, a turtle Pine cone, rats and a frog.
Her job at the recycling centre turned out to be not only ecological and value-bearing work that included helping people, but also an endless source of ideas for materials and works. Penttilä´s art works exude a completely anarchist and defiant, blunt approach to one’s own strange, non-normative existence and against modern demands of productivity, plays built on the basis of the narrow normal of our society. Nukkavierumetsä is located in the yard of an art cottage, and is a ITE forest filled with rhymes, games and thoughts, signs invented by children, and love.
Anna Penttilä is studying to become a practical nurse, also after years of harassment and threats to the ITE-artist by the employment office, which threatened to recover subsidies for making self-made art. The Kirkkonummi Artists’ Association also takes a negative view of Penttilä’s works, and has refused to expand the Nukkavierumetsä forest formed in the yard without permits.
In the art cottage, Penttilä’s works are hung on top of cabinets and shelves, somewhat hidden. Stained tampons are obviously too much for someone, for example, the screamingly colourful work The Talking Shithead, made of leather created by the grain snake Misva, inspired by Putin.
Luckily, Instagram’s free publishing platform and unlimited forest and art yard are available, music can also be posted there as much as you like, and there have already been plenty of sympathizers and praisers.
However, when asked about the situation of dreams in one’s own life, the answer comes sincerely, brightly – and it has nothing to do with art. Anna Penttilä would like to have an education, a generally accepted job and to be useful to society and other people, for example in the nursing profession. Maybe being what the environment has always wanted, and not the wrong kind, or an artist.
Text and images: Heini Heikkilä
