Ideafarm

THE IDEA FARM
research and ideas

The theme for my final project/FMP is roots; both the physical and the psychological ones. The forms and symbolic meanings of roots are captivating and prevalent. The shape itself is repeated endlessly in nature and roots symbolise stability, connections and origins. Contrastingly, the feeling of rootlessness describes a lack of stability and connection to one’s origins.

The seed for the FMP theme was planted on my visit to Danh Vo’s Chicxulub exhibition full of old artefacts and fragments of nature. My investigation of root-like shapes became an independent project and was further explored in the Library of Limbs project. I derive a lot of inspiration from daily observations and from making connections between separate entities as well as from psychology and visual metaphors.

On this page, you can find a free-flowing mix of contextual references, visual experiments and written exploration.

To see the making process, click the root-shoed baby -->

Collages I made during the winter holiday

The world is a web of repeating patterns. One of the patterns that keep repeating looks like roots/lightning/tree branches/neurons. It is a pattern that forms naturally when one thing needs to go from point A to point B such as water, information or air.

My current list of the repeating pattern:
roots
neurons
lightning
branches
rivers
veins
wrinkles
cosmic web/universe
connectography maps
lungs

Pictures used in the collages

Everyday inspiration

Manipulating tree pictures

In Hong kong, Chinese banyan trees that have powerful roots are used to strengthen walls which helps to prevent landslides

Forgotten potatoes

Joonas by Maija Isola, 1961.
I have this postcard in my room and the reference to my plasticine creation of connections is uncanny.

Marimekko a Finnish home furnishings, textiles, and fashion company based in Helsinki. It was founded in 1951 and is most well-known for simplistic and colourful patterns such as Poppy, Stones and Well. Most of these famous prints, and over 500 more, were designed by a textile print designer Maija Isola (1927-2001).

Mandrake roots and witches

"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."
- Carl Jung

First part of John Donne's poem used in Diana Wynne Jones Novel Howl's Moving Castle and on the poem's right side, Hayao Miyazaki's mandrake drawing from the movie adaptation.

Entrance sign to the Helvetinjärvi (Hell's lake) national park in Finland

Artist in focus:
Ai Weiwei

In his 2019 exhibition titled Roots, Ai Weiwei explores both his own roots as well as the roots of humanity and other communities. In the photos, you can see iron casts of roots and trunks of endangered Pequi Vinageiro trees found in Brazil which he found and worked on with the local communities and artisans. The rare roots of Pequi Vinageiro can be over thousands of years old and therefore weave through time longer than our modern civilisation. This work comments on the deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources that happens throughout the world in the name of consumerism and at the expense of our future.

The first time I came across mandrake roots was in Budapest in 2015 spring. I saw a dream in which I, metaphorically, evolved from a girl into a woman and this mandrake-looking plant bloomed around me. The following day, as I was exploring the streets of Budapest, I came across a beautiful little shop that had a tote bag outside of it with the plant from my dream and underneath it read "mandragora femina". At this point, I did not know what mandrakes were so I started researching.

Roots on screen

Psychological roots

Connector
transmitter
receiver

I found out that mandrakes, especially the roots, are one of the most potent, rare and sought-after magical herbs with psychoactive properties. Although Mandrakes are toxic, they have been historically used in small quantities as a sedative and for pain relief. In the world of witches, the uses are often related to protection, love and fertility. The earliest mentions of the root have been tracked down all the way to the 1st century AD and even in the Book of Genesis, Rachel conceives Jacob with the help of a Mandrake root.

The underground system and the underground sewage system as infrastructural roots

My favourite root to eat - turmeric

Ai Weiwei, Strength, 2019

Repeating patterns

The shape of the root has certainly helped it to regain its mystical allure as it often resembles a human body and several myths anthropomorphising have been recorded. For example, it was believed that the root screams as it is dug from the ground as demonstrated in Harry Potter films. Another common belief was that the root damns or kills whoever dugs it up so a practice in which dogs were tied to the root from their leash and yanked the root from the ground, taking on the burden of death or a cruse, was developed.

Later on, I also made the connection between Howl's moving castle (both the book and the movie) and its references to the magical mandrake root. In some ways, I tie all of this together in my own becoming a woman story as Howl/Hauru was one of my first on-screen loves.

Marimekko

The world is a web of repeating patterns. One of the patterns that keep repeating looks like roots/lightning/tree branches/neurons. It is a pattern that forms naturally when one thing needs to go from point A to point B such as water, information or air.

My current list of the repeating pattern:
roots
neurons
lightning
branches
rivers
veins
wrinkles
cosmic web/universe
connectography maps
lungs

Pan's Labyrinth, 2006

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2002

Are we afraid of roots - have they been demonised as something alien, unknown and dangerous?

Roots, definition: "the usually underground part of a seed plant body that originates usually from the hypocotyl, functions as an organ of absorption, aeration, and food storage or as a means of anchorage and support, and differs from a stem especially in lacking nodes, buds, and leaves."

Artist in focus: Bruce Riley

What I found particularly fascinating about these pieces is the choice of materials. The use of cast iron with orange rust patina on top contrasts the subject and the method of making; wood and iron, nature versus human. A constant power struggle which when the human wins, also ultimately loses because without nature there is no human. And in some ways, nature wins as it would eventually take over after us.

The work also relates to in his personal experiences of “uprootedness” after being able to leave China in 2015 and working with refugees. Additionally, all the individual pieces were named based on Ai’s son’s observations of them, thus bringing an intergenerational aspect to the work.

Bruce Riley is an American artist who creates hypnotising resin paintings, resembling a colourful life through the microscope. He describes his process as difficult to control, a mixture of spontaneity and happy accidents, beginning from emptiness. Riley says he does not have a specific space or idea he is trying to define so the focus of his work is on the process and materials. What I love about his paintings is the richness, variety and vividness. These paintings inspired me to do ink painting with colours for the project and also manipulating my b&w ink paintings into colourful creations.

In this project, when I refer to the psychological roots I mean the early connections we form and the "flower pot" we grow up in. This includes primary attachments and home environment as well as the wider context of culture and surroundings.

My roots may be originally grown in Finland but I have dragged them around the world for so long, that I feel like they're far from intact at this point. Instead, I've invested in wings and freedom.

SHOE INSPIRATION

When it comes to shapes, I really enjoy Daniel Widrig's work! Compared to what I aim to do, the materials, methods and tools he uses are very next-level as he is a does this professionally, often using 3D printing Nevertheless, I still enjoy the forms that seem to be created using inspiration from nature.

Aoi Kotsuhiroi
Forbidden colour

Elizaveta Litovka
@floweirdy

Iris Van Herpen x United Nude

Most of the other shoes that I found to relate to my idea of the root shoe are made using 3D printers with different materials. For example, The Claw shoes, are 3D printed from a mixture of wood fibres and silicon and Iris Van Herpen and United Nude "Beyond Wilderness" root-like shoe is also a 3D print.

I started my root shoe journey by thinking of shoes with similar shapes to what I am looking for. The first ones to come to mind were the ippon geta/tengu geta shoes from japan, Venetian renaissance heels and also Beate Karlsson's Claw shoes. Technically my roots shoes will be most like the Japanese wooden shoes because of the material and also because of the balancing act related to them.

Although I'd love to make a 3D printed shoe, we don't have the facilities for that so I will be exploring ways to make them out of wood and other accessible materials.

Daniel Widrig

Elizaveta Litovka is a Ukrainian artist whose work I find extremely inspiring for the shoe-part of the project. She creates temporary shoes out of everyday materials and objects; from fruit peels and flowers to toys and slime. What I love about her work is the freedom, unexpectedness and playfulness. There's a level of no-pressure experimentation (or so it seems) that I aspire to.

Inspiring shapes and forms
On the right side in the collage, there's a picture of this pile of roots on top of a fence right outside my home. I have never quite understood how it ended up there as it is quite a gigantic pile, clearly entangled with the fence.

ZINE inspiration

https://issuu.com/cuntryliving/docs/cl_michaelmas_2020_final_copy__3

https://issuu.com/cuntryliving/docs/cl_mt19_pdf

https://www.sherwoodforestzinelibrary.org/recently-added-pdfs-links

https://issuu.com/segments/issuu/zines

Cuntry Living is one zine that I have enjoyed reading since starting to explore online zines more as an inspiration for the project. It reminds me of the zines I made as a 10-12 yo by cutting up old fashion magazines. What I want to incorporate from it is the playlist they give for each magazine. I will be making a root-related playlist and add it to the ROOTS zine.

The zines on the left are some of the zines I have at home. The top one is a zine of oddities such as deepsea creatures and collections for example a collection of injuries and a collection of sex toys. Many of the pictures could be described as queasy-making, provoking a disgusted reaction from a viewer who dislikes such imagery. What I enjoy about this zine is that it does not explain itself. It is simply visual and it's up to the reader to interpret it the way they want.

Tourists of the Empire State Building is a zine of b&w photography of people who visit the empire state building (I feel slightly dumb spelling that out as it's pretty self-explanatory from the title). I like the idea of just mapping out something very simple and making it into a zine. Clear concept, something that I one day aspire to have.

Limner Journal #3
"Limner is a critical journal of illustration published by Studio Operative.
Its aim is to provide a platform for the exploration, critique and contextualisation of contemporary illustration.
We wish to promote interesting and intelligent illustration and initiate a discourse into wider issues related to the industry, education and social impact (or lack thereof).

We aim to provide an ever changing print space for the dissemination of essays, interviews, dissertations, treatise, manifestos, critiques, calls to arms, narrative series, visual essays and most of all great illustration.

featuring work and words from;
Mike Redmond, Chris Harnan, Jean Jullien, Mrzyk & Moriceau, Sam Rees, Will Edmonds, Jay Cover, Tom Harrad, Grace Helmer & Charlotte Mei Jones, Rosie Eveleigh & Dr. Malte, Oppermann, Zoe Taylor, Romy Blümel, Sinead Evans, Aidan Koch, Peter Nencini, Simon Væth, Miriam Elgon, Evan Meister, Billie Muraben, Stina Löfgren, Mari Kanstad Johnsen, Florence Shaw, Charlie Cameron and Peter Rhodes"

Limner journal (orange cover) is my favourite of all the zines I own. It is a collection of drawings, stories and comics from different artists and is an endless source of inspiration. I love that it features works of all types so even though everything is in b&w, no two works look the same. Even though I am making my zine alone and in two colour riso, I want to try different styles and ways of making to keep it interesting and varied.

I came across this typeface/font on Instagram. I found out that John Banting is/was an English artist and the book includes satirising drawings of aristocratic social gatherings with commentary. The original print had only ten copies in 1933.
For my zine, I will try to make my own version of this font as it has quite a rooty texture... Maybe more fuzzy but I can make it more rooty with thicker brush strokes.

Pico Iyer - Where Is Home?

"Where you come from now is much less important than where you are going,
more and more of us are rooted in the present tense or the future as much as in the past
and home we know is not the place where you happen to be born its the place where you become yourself"

"Movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is not just the place where you sleep, it’s the place where you stand."

This TED talk by the British Essayist Pico Iyer is an exploration of home, roots and belonging. He talks about the residential mobility of today and how we are not tied to a single place anymore as we were in the past. We create our own homes and senses of it.

I had a discussion about this recently; about home and how to tell where it is. I also asked people on instagram to define where home is and got a variety of answers. For some people it is a specific person, for others it's a specific place. For some, it is a feeling. To me, home has become slightly stripped of its emotional connotations since I don't have a physical place I would be tied to. Home is either where I happen to sleep that night or more romantically described; home is where I can put my postcard collection up on the wall.

https://translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/where-you-come-from-is-much-less-important-than-where-you-are-going/

The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and Well-Being
Shigehiro Oishi, 2010

Recent research has shown that residential mobility (number of moves for an individual or percentage having moved recently for a neighborhood) is associated with the primacy of the personal over the collective self. It is also associated with "duty-free" friendships and group memberships rather than obligatory friendships and group memberships. Overall, residential mobility is associated with lower levels of well-being at the individual level of analysis. Finally, residential mobility is associated with personal forms of subjective well-being (based on self-esteem, the verification of the personal self) as opposed to interpersonal forms of subjective well-being (based on social support, the verification of the collective selves). In short, residential mobility is a powerful, parsimonious explanatory construct in the self, social relationships, and subjective well-being and may be a key to understanding the future of mind and behavior in the increasingly mobile world.

I found this research both very understandable as well as disturbing. We have this social-media-influenced idea of what "residential mobility" looks like. Van-life, tour life, nomad life. Hopping from one place to another without a care in the world, simply going with the flow, spontaneously carpeing the diem. The reality is often a lot less inspirational. It's endless packing and unpacking. Trying to find a new place or a place to store your things in while you hop around. I can only talk for myself, even if the research seems to hint to this direction as well. I've moved on average 2-3 times per year since turning 18. I love that I have been able to do that and I have gained such valuable lessons on the way but I can also feel its effect on me. I have grown protective layers on myself because I have come to know the transient nature of things. Even some friendships have become more disposable; spending single days with other travellers with no intention, either way, to meet again. I don't trust or get attached as easily. I still make those stronger connections that I value and care for but often it's just a matter of chance. Is this because I have never set roots as an adult or is this just getting older? I can't quite tell.
This sense of rootlessness I also want to explore on my zine.

https://lovetefljobs.com/10-ways-to-make-yourself-feel-at-home-in-your-new-country/

https://www.internations.org/magazine/ten-ways-to-make-a-country-feel-like-home-39174

https://www.migratingmiss.com/expat-make-home-abroad-feel-like-home/

I've read many articles about how to feel comfortable in a new place.
This year has been the first time I've also struggled with that one because of the lockdown and not being able to do my usual activities - visiting exhibitions, doing group acrobatics and going life drawing. For the zine, inspired by these lists and the idea of us as house plants, I decided to make a How-To for my zine

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/into-the-nihilistic-doodles-of-avocado-ibuprofen

AI-generated text (based on his previous comics) illustrated by Avocado_ibuprofen. 3 Screenshots of his 9-frame comic.
Jaakko Pallasvuo is a Finnish artist, better known as his Instagram alias Avocado_Ibuprofen, who writes and illustrates comics/short stories. I appreciate his comics because he is able to communicate feelings and ideas that many people have but do not notice or know how to verbalise. I remember the first time when I saw his comic, my initial reaction was "why is this so long, nobody's attention span is this long on Instagram" but after reading it, I was hooked. Each comic has a very distinctive feel to it and the topics are often related to society, the absurdity of existence and life as a creator in the 21st century. I chose this particular comic because recently he has started to feed his old works into a text generator AI, creating new work based on old patterns. I think it is a very clever idea and suits his commentary on the absurdity of today. Besides being illustrative, Pallasvuo's comics have elements of graphic design and use the collaging technique in a very fine art manner. The most impressive part of his work, in my opinion, is his ability to come up with fresh yet deep stories day after day. He is a master of observing and verbalising his observations.
I want to bring a little bit of this mood and visual chaos to some pages of my zine, possibly on the comic about rootlessness that I will be making

ROOTLESSNESS

CARTOONS AND COMICS

Liana Finck

Liana Finck is an American cartoonist and author who is well-known for her simplistic yet poignant cartoons often featured in The New Yorker. In her work, I enjoy the minimalistic accuracy with which she can turn universal feelings and moments into a clearly communicating visual form. I also like the addition of text which often assists the interpretation without overpowering the image. This is a style that I sometimes have in my diary drawings and more casual drawings and will incorporate in the zine.

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/liana-finck

For my zine, I want to include a couple of things that will make it more interactive in the style of a kid's activity book. A classic labyrinth word picture match or something along those lines https://pipettegazette.uthscsa.edu/2020/03/18/free-science-coloring-book-pages/