Community art in the North

In art history, there have been many artists who were inspired by the North. Pallasmaa (2019) describes that the North is not a distinct place; rather, it is a direction, an orientation, an atmosphere, an experiential condition and a state of mind and the North points to solitude and night-time (p. 13). Pallasmaa continues discussing the North by introducing designers such as Alvar Aalto, Tapio Wirkkala and Rut Bryk who were inspired from landscape, northern nature and life. Hautala-Hirvioja (2013) says that “landscape art, as well as painting and environmental art, determines one’s perception of nature” (p. 34).

There were many artists who painted the landscape of Finnish Lapland from the early 1800s such as Andres Ekman and Wilhelm von Wright. They painted the northern landscape in a way of documenting from the outsider’s eyes. In the late 1800s artists such as Pekka-Hermanni Kyrö and Juho Kyyhkynen described the environment and people in the North with a local gaze-oriented way (Hautala-Hirvioja, 2013, pp. 36–38). In the 1900s, artists like Reidar Särestöniemi and Einari Junttila made art not only about northern nature, but also their personal experience and connection to the landscape and the cultural heritage of the North (Hautala-Hirvioja, 2013, 2019). In the 1980s, there was a significant change in the art history brought by contemporary art and this affected arts in northern Finland as well. Artists started making art from community and environment-oriented perspectives by avoiding the traditional forms of artmaking. Natural elements such as snow and ice in the Northern landscape were used as materials for artwork. The focus on community and site-specific issues became significant together with the appreciation of locality. Kaija Kiuru made site-specific environmental art that concerns the relationship between man and nature in Lapland.

According to Kwon (2004), site-specific art was initially understood in physical and spatial forms, but it was extended to the phenomenological, social/institutional and discursive dimensions. Kwon (2004) says that the value of art does not reside in the art object itself, but it lies in the interaction between the artist and the community. Moreover, she points out that the artist’s assimilation into a given community and the art work’s integration with the site (p.

Hautala-Hirvioja (2013) discusses that Timo Jokela finds the strong relationship between the environment and people living in and try to deepen the meaning and the relation through community and environmental oriented gaze. In the northern context, arctic arts help to understand arts in the North. According to Huhmarniemi and Jokela (2020), arctic arts mean contemporary art, design, media productions discussing Arctic themes and sustainability in the Arctic. Arctic arts reform and present northern and Arctic knowledge and create connectedness between the past, present and future. They also include not only indigenous art, but also non-indigenous art. Arctic arts understand arts in connection with daily life, not separating arts from our everyday life.

In northern Finland, community art was developed together with environmental art.

Community art came into existence at the same time as environmental art did in the 1960s.

Community art is based on the idea of committed art and it emphasises social problems in community life (Jokela et al., 2006). According to Pascal Gielen (2011), all art is relational as it makes a statement about society to a particular part of society. He adds that, in community art, the relationship with people is at the centre. Thus, community art is at the very least relational art. To be said as community art, there should be active involvement of people in an artistic process or in the production of work of art (Gielen, 2011). Grant Kester (2010) discusses collaborative arts in environmental art. In the collective artworks, which is usually how community art is, there is not just artworks, but the forms of physical and verbal exchange exist in the centre. The collective labour and the relationship between shared labour and cognitive sight should be emphasised when planning projects as well as theoretical backgrounds. Community arts are many times implemented as a project work. John Clammer (2014, p. 22) discusses that community arts projects have a positive effect on feelings of increasing control of communities' environment on the part of people living in previously unattractive neighbourhoods. Community art also creates a sense of autonomy and creativity when high levels of participation and in-out are encouraged and build self-esteem when people discover that they have talents and unsuspected abilities (p. 22).

Jokela (2013) understands community art as a form of applied art, which has great possibilities for development in the public and social sector (p. 17), because community-artistic activity is well-suited for development projects that utilise new operational models and methods. The

multidisciplinary and multi-artistic process when making community art is significant (Jokela et al., 2006). Artists must become familiar with location and community first of all and then documentation can be done. After that work can be published in the art world. They also commented on the media of community artworks. There are no clear boundaries between environmental, performance, conceptual and media art. Artists are increasingly working together with experts of different fields, groups of citizens, and other communities. In addition, different events, exhibitions and festivals have become more common (Jokela et al., 2006).