Henrietta Lehtonen builds gardens of dreams

Unlike Helsinki, Tampere does not have railway station designed by Saarinen, a President's palace, big, ambitious building projects or a huge Stockmann department store. Here, the setting is intimate; a peculiar balance of overriding natural purity and 19th century factories. Everything is simple and restrained, and, more often than not, there are three levels of contact with the world: Tampere. Helsinki. Elsewhere.

Tampere is typically reached by train. All distances in the town are measured from the railway station, says Henrietta Lehtonen, who lives in Tampere. Another way to communicate is by mail. This is how Henrietta got her first art lessons. She sent her own pictures to a famous artist in Helsinki, who, incidentally, painted portraits of Finland´s post-war presidents. He sent his valuable comments back in a letter. Since there was nowhere to study painting in Tampere, Henrietta also got any advice she could from books, which listed the correct recipes for painting. Following one of these rules, Henrietta arranged a still-life of yellow roses, her first installation. Time after time, she mailed her projects to the selection jury for the Young Finnish Artists´ exhibition. She was finally accepted for her first exhibition in Helsinki, and got her first reviews. She has continued in this way, living in Tampere, exhibiting in Helsinki and elsewhere.

Today, Henrietta Lehtonen´s visiting card is a video work containing the image of a child: The Infant (1995) from the L´enigma del Campo project, which was mounted during the 1995 Venice Biennale. The same work was taken to the Istanbul biennial, which was curated by René Block.

This work´s naiveté is truly inspiring in the context of today´s art. The associations with religious art in a religious environment, a church, and the "spiritual elusiveness" of the projected video image are used to their best advantage. Henrietta says that, already in her first video work This Girl (1990), which has now become a classic example of Finnish feminist art, she attempted to establish direct contact with the viewer, and that she wanted the emotional contact with the image to be stronger than the intellectual understanding of it.

As you look at the video of the child, you understand that the image carries within it personality, and that the division into object and observer is no more than an effect of the stance you assume. It should be noted that the observer tends to abuse the object of his observation. (In ancient mythology, to scrutinise meant to control.) Many of the infants of Renaissance Madonna´s - so similar to the child in Henrietta´s work of today - carry a red coral to protect them from the evil eye. The object is often invested with all the experience and longings of the observer, which have nothing to do with its own personality. It becomes a projection of the observer´s own experience, rather than a perception of reality. In the Infant however, the figure of the child is what makes the observer feel at ease, and helps him establish a direct contact with the image. Here, it is the observer, not the object, that is invested with an active impulse towards naive and positive reflex ion on the world. The emotional contact with this basic image makes it comprehensible to a very wide audience, and does not require special training in art theory. In Henrietta´s words, the idea of art will really be able to survive only if it is spread to as wide an audience as possible. Henrietta has staged several café installations; one at the group exhibition Extra muros at the Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art (1994), another in a Venice square (L´enigma, 1995). In Ghent, the given situation was thoroughly transformed. A wooden construction, tables, chairs, were installed in the exhibition hall. Coffee was served in Henrietta´s decorated cups, and visitors were invited to sit down, have a coffee, socialise, take part in the creative process. Without them, the work had no life.

Usually, the café is a place more for socialising and gatherings than for consumption. Unlike traditional closed communities, the crowd in a café usually has a relaxing effect on the visitor. The basic idea of the café is detrimental to control, and thus it also tolerates deviations. The friendly gathering is an act that requires an effort from all the participants. (It is also necessary even to maintain the position of neutral outsider.) These efforts make it possible for the participants to become equals, which is again necessary in order to eliminate any sense of compulsion. In the café, but not in the concert hall, everyone is both an observer and a performer. In these "café" works, communication is universal, and everyone assumes an active role.

The 1993 Prejudices exhibition included Henrietta Lehtonen´s video work, Dream (1992), Projected on a fluttering soft screen. This piece, from a series showing an idyllic garden and its inhabitants, transmitted a very subtle sense of place from one spatial situation to another. Highly fragile images, and undefined but evocatively real garden sounds. These were memories, as pure as in a dream. In this work, Henrietta´s contact with the image is not at all influenced by the cultural stereotypes gathered around it, and which usually affect our reflex ion on everything. it is, of course, an endlessly complex task to represent something that is genuinely pretty.

Perhaps no category of reflex ion is so fenced in by prejudices and stereotypes as beauty. To experience it, a commentary is necessary, because the educated observer and critic is so suspicious. Beauty, like other sincere positivist categories, is too fragile and non-competitive. Regardless of this, however, Henrietta´s works are circulated widely, and are fully justifiable contextually. There is a place for her in exhibitions of contemporary art, where she often comes across as comparatively untouched by conflict in a conflicting environment. Essentially, her gardens of dreams and expectations are dulcet utopias, the ideal alternative to contemporary reality. Simply by existing, they help bridge the gap between reality and the observer´s dreams, they offer a possibility of trust and belief.

There is something homely and personal about Henrietta´s work. One of her latest is Nest (1995). Nests, built by a small person out of furniture and blankets, have stood in every family´s home. This is exactly what Henrietta´s recent piece looks like. She reconstructed the nest she built as a child. To create one’s "nest", a space for activity and rest, Henrietta says, is a natural urge for every human being. And for children to build nests, where only good people are let in, is an archetypal act of construction and certainly an important stage in the development of the conscious personality.

Her figurines of small animals whit their autonomous little worlds also relate to this concept: the small lives of small people. There are strange comings and goings amidst the cardboard firs, next to the immense-looking schoolroom globes. Henrietta says she did not suffer emotionally as a child, and that she does not have any bad memories of childhood. She was under her mother’s protection all the time, and even if something unpleasant happened, the children were not told. "I was a small person protected by my mother, and I realised only later on that I have power too." For Henrietta, her mother’s house means support, the foundation of a worldview, the garden of dreams where nothing negative can happen.

A series of Arabia cups (1993 - 1994) personally interpreted by Henrietta Lehtonen and usually arranged into a china pyramid, are covered with pretty but anarchic blotches of blue glaze. These almost look like natural fingerprints left behind on all the objects that our hands touch. Normally, only a detective could see that decoration, having applied a special powder. Henrietta glazed this porcelain with her own hands. Her fingerprints are there, reminding us of the author and of the work of her hands. In this case, the author is easily identified, even without the signature. The issue of whether the imprints make a beautiful ornament or a simply ruin "innocence" is determined only by the point of view we adopt. The act of creation starts with the will to change things, to intrude into the existence of the conditionally ideal. Mistakes and accident then exist with as much right as the conscious result. In Henrietta´s china sets, the results of random improvisation are there to be seen. Chance is part of the intention. The imprints are a side-effect of touch, but also part of the overall harmony. They signify remembrance, which is such an important aspect of existence, a whole individual world in itself, because it cannot even pretend to be objective.

Henrietta´s passions are about seeing, touching and thinking, about the longing for friendship, and about the imprints that remain after every touch, the results of which can never be anticipated in real life, but are fully controllable when things take place in thought or in art. In a dream or a daydream, a situation starts from the beginning, goes on and finishes. Sometimes it is interrupted, and disintegrates as the dream ends, or then a stronger impression, perhaps reality itself, intrudes upon it. In a dream, the outcome of a situation depends on the trust and belief encoded in every human being.

Henrietta Lehtonen´s work deal with what is seen from within, and it is oriented inwards. Even the social episodes, quite rare as it were, are dissociated from all theorising and objectification. The constantly reiterated subjects: table-cloths, a table and chair, pieces of china, all unite people for friendly intercourse, and yet they are also memories of childhood, family archetypes. In Henrietta´s work, the situation is positive from beginning to end. Even the residual imprints are everyday side-effects that carry no bitterness. This unity in her work between the technical side of life and the dream amounts to something more than just a creative stance. She is well aware of the wonderful privilege of being actively satisfied with what you are.