Burning Herbarium

Anna Karhu-Cormier’s Burning herbarium is less an object-based exhibition than that necessary cross-pollination between nature and culture. It is a gestural ritualistic presentation with plants that are reborn as candles. A candle is lit and visitors can pause by the Burning Herbarium. The herbarium slowly disappears as people interact, burning these candles ritualistically. Brief as these candles lives are, they symbolically parallel our own brief lives passage. We witness this ever revolving cylinder of time entering into it from birth until we are released from it. We endlessly dissolve and reform. This flux of form and matter is ever present.

 

Each candle has its procreative design, its route or path that stems from the shapes and structures of these plants, Karhu-Cormier has brought into a renewed context. Self and other, culture and nature, remain indivisible for everything comes from somewhere.

 

Like culture, nature has become an untouchable, distant phenomenon we prefer not to engage with. Images of nature, images that represent culture are superseding the living culture. With plants, beeswax, essential oil and a copper plate this herbarium becomes a bridge over troubled waters. Each of us, in our own way, enacts it, and brings a point of contact to nature, to these plants, and to ourselves. This well of synthesis becomes a key to our future, how we will be able to survive beyond the mere machinations of the consumption production paradox.

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All this on Stage Mother Earth  -  a nature theatre that remains as we come and go over the ages.

 

Text by John K. Grande

John K. Grande’s latest book in English and German is Kunst Raum Natur (2022 J. S. Klotz Verlagshaus, Germany).

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Burning Herbarium is currently part of the RUNO Biannual exhibition FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN

until 1. of October 2023 in Porvoo, Finland

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Previous exhibitions: 

Ikipuhe -ryhmänäyttely, Jaatsi, Sastamala 2024

After Life, Snow galleria, Berlin 6-27.1.2023

Mökki, Lokal Helsinki, 2022

Ritual Candles are available Lokal gallery webshop

The Sense of Spirituality, Helsinki Design Week, 2022

Candle Event, Doinel shop, Tokyo, Japan 2022

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