Love And Death: A Study of Co-creation
by admin
As a part of the What’s on Your Loom Series, we feature the works, Love and Death, by Miisa Lehto and Samu Salovaara. This is an immersive installation that transforms a bedroom into a layered exploration of human connection and artistic collaboration. Miisa and Samu tell us more…
Works…
Love And Death
The installation represents an elaborate bedroom corner. Every aspect of the bedroom is covered with the same satin fabric. In the corner stands a tall canopy bed, perhaps a double bed. When standing close to the side of the bed, one can get a feeling of softness and a luxurious hotel suite-like comfort. On the other hand, getting too close to the bed can become overwhelming. As often as the ultimate comfortability, this too comes with a price. The bedroom, with all it’s frills and plush, depicts a perverse egoism and is truly an obsessive performance about love and death.
The bedroom invites the eye to follow the story illustrated on the opulent green satin fabric. At the first glance, from further away, the viewer perceives the fabric as a uniform surface. Moving closer, this surface transforms into a pattern, finally disintegrating into different levels of typographic and illustrative elements. Cartoonish illustrations of flowers are tempting the viewer to listen to their story. The flowers are singing and swaying along with a love song of Ebo Taylor’s Love and Death (Taylor, 1980). A song, which in its lyrics so perfectly crystallizes the concept of co-exsistence. Love is being the uniting and fueling core of collaboration revolving around learning and sharing, and death can be interpreted as the abandonment of the individual artistic ego. What comes to the story wrapped around every elements of the bedroom, is it as much sorrowful as it is gratifying?
One has been given the freedom to explain the installation however they see fit. It delivers no answers to questions of right or wrong, happy or sad, together or alone. Is the bedroom soothing or disturbing, as it can simultaneously be a place of sweet dreams and agonizing nightmares?
Process…
Love and Death is the outcome of Miisa Lehto and Samu Salovaara’s collaborative Master’s thesis, Love and Death: Study of Co-Creation, where the research aimed to focus more on the experiential aspects of collaboration rather than the end result. The thesis presents their co-creative process and journey as precisely as it occurred, nothing added and nothing left out.
Lehto and Salovaara explore and research their shared intuitive approach to creation, which they have practiced over the past decade, along with the artistic connection between them, through a working method they call co-creation. The purpose of this symbiotic state of creation is to dissolve individual artistic egos to unleash the group’s maximum artistic potential. The outcome of co-creation is a unique work of art that none of the individuals could have achieved alone.
“The mechanism of collaboration became increasingly obvious as our process of co-creation advanced from ideas to action. The co-creative journey is never explicitly black or white, and the process of co-creation can not be pin pointed on a linear line. Instead, it consist of nuances and variables which move simultaneously on different wavelengths, formulating multiple narratives and guiding to the process of co-creation. These ever-balancing factors finally determine the outcome of the collaboration. As we reflect back to the process and this particular installation, we are seeing the full spectrum of colors related to our collaboration and this co-creative practice.” – Lehto & Salovaara.
Technical specifications…
Our goal was to produce a high-end fabric reminiscent of traditional Toile de Jouy tapestries. During the material and structural sampling process, we discussed the importance of keeping it simple. This meant avoiding multi-layered structures, filler yarns, or other coded gimmicks in the design. We also considered using only satin bindings to further enhance the shine of the mercerized cotton—our chosen yarn for this project—and incorporating an additional warp-faced satin to create a luxurious vertical sheen.
After multiple trials with different end satins, we settled on a 16-end satin, which provided the best shine and the sharpest color separation within our limited two-weft palette. Material and structural samples for the project were hand-woven on a TC2 loom before producing the required 25 meters of fabric on Aalto University’s Stäubli GA1000 industrial-scale jacquard loom.
Weft material: Venne Colcoton 100% mercerized cotton with Nm 34/2; weft density 34 picks per centimeter; repeat 60 x 60 cm; fabric width 120 cm
About…
Miisa Lehto (b.1993) is a textile artist and designer who graduated from Aalto University’s Master’s Program in Fashion, Clothing, and Textile Design. Lehto has strong expertise in woven fabric structures and materials, with her work featured in productions by international corporations. Her technical weaving skills can also be admired in Maarit Salolainen’s groundbreaking publication on weaving, Interwoven: Exploring Materials and Structures.
Samu Salovaara (b. 1990) is a graphic designer and audiovisual multi-creator from Helsinki, Finland who graduated from Aalto University’s Master’s Program in Visual Communication Design. His interests extend from typographic hierarchies to woven fabrics, record engineering, and everything in between and beyond. Salovaara’s work can be seen internationally in the underground music scene, from the visual identities of bands to music videos, as well as in his own musical productions.
Together, they form an artistic entity that explores collaborative artistic practice through the method of co-creation. Having studied weaving under the supervision of the Aalto ARTS textile faculty, they possess extensive knowledge of the technical qualities of woven jacquard fabrics, storytelling through material, and conceptual art practice.
Links…
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