My artistic practice explores contemporary cultural and societal questions related to humanity, nature, gender, and relationality. Rooted in Finnish folk tradition, mythology, and contemporary visual language, my work combines painting, drawing, installation, and mixed materials to address ecological, cultural, and embodied knowledge.
In Finnish folk belief, the vulva has been understood as a powerful, life-giving symbol and a liminal gateway between worlds, a source of protection, fertility, and transformation. Ritual gestures such as harakointi and pyllyttäminen, where vulva was revealed to forest or to objects, were practiced as forms of folk magic, believed to ward off danger, influence natural forces, and assert agency through the body. These traditions reveal how sexuality, spirituality, and everyday life were once deeply intertwined and how bodily symbolism functioned as a form of knowledge and power. I examine how this vulva-centered symbolism continues to live, often implicitly, within Finnish cultural memory and contemporary behavior.
My work investigates how gender, sexuality and taboo are constructed through cultural narratives and inherited belief systems, as well as how humans understand and negotiate their relationship with the natural world.
Visually, my works are layered, vibrant, and materially rich, blending traditional techniques with experimental use of textures such as sand, furr and glitter. Through bold color, materiality, and symbolism, I seek to deconstruct restrictive norms and recover embodied, intuitive ways of knowing.
My practice functions as an artistic research process that challenges dominant narratives and opens space for dialogue reconnecting contemporary experience with ancestral knowledge, and proposing new ways of understanding the body, nature, and the worlds that exist between them.
Minttu Saarinen
