Anssi Törrönen - What is

For quite some time now, I’ve been keen to express my practice through spatial sculpture. I just never knew how to get started, what the literal first step would be.

But then last winter, a stretch of woodland I know well was cut down and turned into pulp or timber. A forest that I’d taken for granted, that I had thought I understood, suddenly changed and vanished. It felt like this landscape had become a metaphor for constant change and the ephemerality of everything.

One day, I was walking across the newly created clearing and noticed bits of the trees, their body parts, scattered about on the ground. They were crying out, desperate to be turned into art.

In What is, I will be exhibiting three-dimensional works and drawings for the first time. They will be shown alongside oil paintings.

What all these works have in common is the way they engage with the interstitial space between abstraction and representation. Their smooth flowing, interior bodily shapes are the result of a subconscious creative process. The techniques I use, painting, sculpture and drawing, feed off one another, cross-pollinate one another. My sculptures bring together the readymade wood I discovered with wood, steel and plaster of paris that I have shaped and worked myself. My drawings combine collage, watercolour, felt tip pen and pencil.

Anssi Törrönen