Exploring the Fissures

To access what it contains, it needs to be cracked open. You need to find an entrance to explore what it holds.

Throughout the exhibition, sculptures operate as openings into this world that can never be fully experienced. Fragments of landscapes emerge through carved surfaces and printed layers. Each work functions like a fissure into an expanding ecosystem where fiction and simulation continuously overlap.

Walking through the gallery space, you are encountered with windows, from where you can see through. You’ll navigate life fragments of the egg character, unnamed.

Capture.

Frozen frames.

Specific assets are being performed at the instant that the screen was shot. Each sculpture offers a crack. An open fissure. Looking through a hole. Peephole effect. Multiple layers are being performed.

Digital Topographies

Through processes of digital modeling, image capture, scanning, carving, burning, stiching and reconstruction, Eetu transforms photographs and memories into speculative spatial forms. Personal images are translated into vertex maps, rendered environments and sculptural fragments, generating new topographies that oscillate between documentation, and invention.

The digital medium allows reality to be continuously modified, extended, and rewritten: new information can always be added, surfaces can mutate, the world can expand.

Virtuality offers this complex and singular capacity to build upon realities. Capable to reimagine places that may have once existed, or not.

Taking a picture, a ritual known for saving a memory. An image has the power to translate what was once lived. And reactivate it. An algorithm generates reconstructions, then nonexistent points grow around. The digital does not simply reproduce what was there; it adds information, creates gaps, invents new points, and allows mutation.

How are these points being carved?

What does it mean to modify and build upon what once was?

Eetu world-builds as a means of exploring alternative narratives and realities. To imagine is to perform a certain degree of familiarization and alienation. The landscape is infinite, yet not like our capacity to experience it. The topographic map where the egg is found is only one of multiple realities coexisting.

The Carrier Bag Theory

How is it to hold on to a story? Rematerializing in all of the possible directions. A vessel. The egg, that holds on to their own life, becomes the new hero, as Ursula K. Le Guin puts it: “a container for the things contained.”

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin states that before the tool that forces energy outward: cuts, attacks, or conquers. We made tools that hold: a bag, a vessel, a shell. Something made to gather things and bring them home. In this sense, Sihvonen’s sculptures can be understood as containers. They are not the world, yet they carry its different fragments. Hard as wood but delicate and translucit. The sculptures are built on their own case to be preserved and protected.

Materiality and the Machine

Eetu’s work is a continual conversation between fingers and hands. The digital medium offers him the capacity to mimic what once was broken. Offering an opening to what is being protected from light. Printed in parts, then assembled and treated, weightless. Memories exposed.

How the character lives inside the world? The egg has different forms and can mutate. Materiality collides:

Wood: textured, layered, like 3D printed models.

Resin: soft and photosensitive.

Polylactic acid: light but valuable.

The work also holds the labour and intensity of facing the unexpected when working with machines. Printing does not remove care from the process; it displaces it. The equipment must be maintained, adjusted, cleaned, watched. It requires attention, patience, and a constant negotiation with error.

Mechanic choreography. Unexpected issues. The machine demands attention.

The wood, once rooted and grounded, it becomes the structure that holds these fragile digital reconstructions together. Surfaces oscillate between organic textures and layered computational aesthetics.

Rematerialization

At the end, the image of all is what will stay. Rematerialization on loop.

To one way or another. Does not matter anymore. Viewers are players and get to discover the world Eetu’s imagined. The work appears through this choreography between hand, tool, file, and error. Inviting you to look through the cracks. To enter through shells. To discover fragments of the world. This parallel reality where the egg lives.

Each sculpture contains partial glimpses into a world that remain unresolved. At the end, what remains are not complete stories, but material traces of their rematerialization.

Laura Subirats