Untitled, 2017

Rowan berries and chickenwire

This work was made for the “Mirage” exhibition at ISFAG october 2017 together with other 3rd year installation and sculpture students, working around the themes “inside/outside” and “nature vs.human” for a course given by Stacey Koosel.

“Untitled” is a 3.5 m high and 2 m wide installation of 250kg handpicked Rowan berries and chickenwire. The chickenwire is hidden under the mass of carefully attached berries, which are coming down from an open roof window, like a curtain not yet touching the ground. For about 7 days Hannah was driving around on a bike discovering Tallinn and its green areas where she found lots of trees heavily loaded with Rowan berries.

By constantly being outside, driving around, picking berries, moving back and forth from forests and back to the exhibitions space and spending many hours attaching the berries onto the chickenwire, at the “adventures” location at ISFAG (where nature literally took over the space, cause of the bad conditions of the building), she consciously tried to engage herself with her new surrounding.

The artist wanted to confront herself with the Estonian weather, the fruits of the autumn, the rowan berry, which is at the same time an important symbol for the end of the summertime and the beginning of the decay of fruits and other plants in Estonia, and with the space the exhibition took place. The work Hannah created is not only showing the strength and beauty of nature but also the time in space and the decay in material, at that moment. After 3 months of letting the berries dry at the Raja campus of Estonian Academy of Arts and before her departure home, she brought the dried berries back into the forest (see additional picture). Her way of saying goodbye to Estonia and for the still evolving and decaying work to have a final moment of going back to where it came from.