tundrakuikka-blog

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Colour floating on cotton. Saw really bravely bold artwork yesterday @mokkigalleria and now I want to make new material experiments. This cotton fibre is actually salvaged from an old futon that if the story is true, used to belong to a Finnish astronomer. I like to think that a tiny bit of the cosmos is thus infused in the fibers. (paikassa TEHDAS Teatteri) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtqXDHklKdd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=l6g4eot71rh0

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I'm trying out Society6 and hoping that slowly things can build into something sustainable. By clicking the above link, you can check out the full range of my art products and get a discount.

The phone cases look like candy. Good thing I don’t own an Iphone because then I would get them all. 

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Available on Redbubble and soon also on Society6!

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Dandelion wine

“The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust… It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.” – Ray Bradbury, Dandelion wine

This book is so beautifully written, it’s like drinking good wine. It’s about memories of life in a small town and full of nostalgia about wonderful little rituals that are done every year and are somehow almost pagan in their purpose. However it also made me think about the myriad of ways humans have alienated themselves from nature and developed into beings that cannot be a part of it even if they wanted to. We cannot survive in the elements like all the sleek animals that survive and grow in them. It’s the cost of being too clever maybe. Not that I have anything against intelligence, but sometimes it seems like we have perhaps forgotten to stretch our other abilities on the way. Therefore, we have to mow our lawns, paint our houses, install heating and never eat what grows in the garden.

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The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust… It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion wine

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Dark rivers (2018), mixed media painting.

This btw, is for sale as a print in my Society6 shop for -40% until end of Monday the 4th!

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I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

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I tell myself this as I walk an hour through snow to and from work. It's part of nature here, and I am just not equipped to embrace it.

The winter, with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected.

- from Journal

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Walden inspired. Available on Redbubble.

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This artwork is called The Circle and you can buy it on various art product on Redbubble -> Mirva Kuvaja @ Redbubble.

You can follow me on Instagram as @ tundrakuikka and I have a website too and I’m also on Society6 and Ello. 

As this is my first proper Tumblr post I thought I’d introduce my work a bit. I am a textile artist who cannot stick to her genre and also does jewellery art, illustration and painting. This blog is for the illustration work and also for my thoughts on nature and Henry D. Thoreau.

I’ve been digitally editing some of my older work that I drew few years ago, because I realised that there is not reason to keep it in the desk drawer. My work then and now is about a human connection to nature and how it changes, particularly in urban places. In other words, I draw a lot of plants, decay, abandoned buildings and stuff that veers toward the occult. I’m also obsessed with Thoreau’s work and will refer to it a lot.

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The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs.

Henry D. Thoreau