Kira Leskinen ”Meledo”

The strong red charges at you, the yellow is calm and the black moves further away. Some things, events and feelings go beyond linguistic comprehension and only appear in the images as sharp angles, digital noise and a rhythm of black and white. Through my images, I try to find something that I cannot express through words. Often it is to do with a physical experience of a feeling. I choose names for my works intuitively and on a phonetic basis – depending on what each work feels like in my mouth.

My work involves a great deal of repetition; I change the relationships between the elements and create numerous images, often as a surge of ten or twenty images. In this respect, a scanner is a good tool to use. I do not waste any material and, thanks to digital imaging technology, I can have as many tries as I want. I can do and try things. The key thing is that I do not have to be careful.

I spent November 2019 in the Circolo Scandinavo residence in Rome. During the month, I created so many images, with fresh colors and edgy black and white. Often I feel that I can work more freely when the environment and conditions around me change. However, sometimes the color of an opposite building’s wall, a particularly rough or shiny paper, thick felt or crayons found in the desk drawer serve as the necessary stimulus for creativity.

Over the past couple of years, I have broadened my work to include woodcuts. In my woodcuts, I use the reduction technique which involves cutting the block and printing layers of color until the series of prints is complete and the block is destroyed. Unlike scanography, this technique is slow and laborious; the layers of color are thin and the end result takes shape step by step. I get the themes from myself – I want to see how an image created using a scanner and based on digital mistakes makes its way back to paper by means of woodcut. I am fascinated by the serial nature of woodcuts and the uniqueness of each print. Furthermore, the light translucent layers of color that are characteristic of woodcuts have become part of my work with scanners.

Kira Leskinen (b. 1987) is a Helsinki-based visual artist. Her artistic work is dominated by scanography, abstract images created using a scanner. Leskinen earned her Master of Arts degree from Aalto University in 2016. She has taken part in several group and solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Meledo at Galleria Huuto is her fifth solo exhibition.

The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the Kone Foundation.

www.kiraleskinen.com