Art Center Ahjo, Hiili-Room: Silja Uuttula

SILJA UUTTULA - HOOVES AND NOTES 12.2.-2.3.2025

Good Friday, 2024. A fickle early spring day when you can’t quite decide if you should wear a sweater or a windbreaker. We walk together to the yard where you are supposed to be picked up next week. The sandy road is still frozen, and it sounds as though hooves are hitting asphalt. Stopping, listening. We humans measure the yard. By all reason, a large vehicle should be able to stop here, but will the body be able to cross the small stream? Your caretaker spreads out a hay bale in preparation. You take a taste. The yard oddly serves as a stage awaiting death, but death has only been ordered and is not yet on its way.

While trekking with the horse, a lot was observed, imagined, and different places were sensed. Many of the locations were already named by earlier travelers: the abandoned house loop, the mill loop, the house with the barking dog. The swaying geography of intersecting villages became familiar and occasionally led us astray. Yet, every time, I felt a profound sense of the freedom of thought during these trips. Guided by horses, I have ended up in countless places throughout my life, places I would never have gone to otherwise—both literally and figuratively.

In the spring of 2024, around the time of my hoofed friend’s death, I came up with the idea that I wanted to paint a horse. It seemed like an easy idea, but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t solve it in an interesting way. While I was at a residency in Estonia—again near horses—I decided to try drawing for the first time in a while. Soon, I realized that by drawing, and especially with charcoal, I could capture the psychological charge I was seeking in the horse. Buildings, yards, and other elements began to appear around the horses, based on images I had taken and found. The exhibition showcases drawings from various stages of the process, created in different geographical locations. Some are highly developed, while others are more like notes, yet all share themes of the sense of place and the themes of impermanence and change connected to it.

Silja Uuttula (b. 1988) is a painter who graduated from the Free Art School in 2022. She works with oil paints and drawing. She has held five solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group and collective exhibitions in Finland and Germany. Hooves and Notes is her first exhibition focusing solely on drawings.