NEW FREQUENCY
Caroline Pipping (b. 1958) graduated from the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 1987 and was already accepted as a member of the Finnish Painters’ Union that same year. She has held numerous solo exhibitions – in Helsinki and Turku – but also abroad, mainly in Italy and most recently in Japan – and in Mariehamn Åland, where she has lived since 2000. In addition to the solo exhibitions, she has participated in group exhibitions in several places in Finland and abroad – ranging from De Unga’s exhibition in Helsinki to Romberg House in Rome.
Pipping describes her exhibition at KWUM an enseble with both sculptures in raku-fired ceramics and large-format paintings; “Painting is naturally my main artistic expression, but I think I carried the sculptures inside me for quite a long time. Possibly since my childhood years in Zambia. At least they have grown completely organically and felt like a natural part of my artistry. The decision to raku-burn the sculptures was also obvious given the uncontrollable and special rawness that the technique expresses.
I started with the first series of sculptures, The Nomads, back in 2013–14, i.e. just before the large stream of refugees from Syria started arriving. But questions around the concept of “displacement” have in principle always interested me. I am interested in how the presence or absence of cultural contexts and cultural identity affects the experience of self and experience of identity.
The paintings in the exhibition were created in connection with the installation “Nomads in Time&Space” in 2018 and represent a more abstract dimension of the content.
The series of sculptures with the name “The Helpers”, on the other hand, were born more like a vision. The Helpers are beings that exist on a frequency that is mostly invisible to the human eye and they have, as the name says, come to help humanity. However, the help does not come in the form of answers to our questions – the Helpers do not communicate with language at all – but instead they communicate exclusively through play.
“New Frequency”, the title of one of the paintings and now also of my exhibition at KWUM, refers to the possibility of a new level of conscious communication – a new frequency.”
