Anu Tuominen turns her attention to materials and tools, with which everyone is familiar, such as kitchen utensils and stationery, and appropriates them through simple acts of knitting, cutting or assorting. Her works often involve aspects of craft; making a necklace by threading bead-like shortened pieces of pencils, or transforming old gloves into vessels or little animals by sewing them together. Although they all originate in concepts, they carry a sense of warmth, often concealing humor for which one cannot help bursting into a laugh. The artist carefully observes and analyzes each object’ s form and function, and the quality and colors inherent in materials. While maintaining the original state of an object, she gives a second life to it, triggering an endless chain of imagination for a viewer as in a word-association game.

‘Blue’ is the title of Tuominen’s fourth solo exhibition at Art-U room. It gathers the works inspired by ‘blue’ - by its color as well as its connoted sense of gloom or sadness. A stain of blue ink left on the paper; a chain of blue beads crocheted from the blue thread; all these pieces seem to allude a state where a poetic image would emerge and vanish in the blue of the endless sky once a certain word or shape had taken its form.

The show is accompanied by Anu Tuominen’s new publication “Naturally!”. This book records Tuominen’s creative practice in her daily life and surroundings.