Spring sun melts winter art

Snow artist Timo Jokela produces sculptures for world’s art museums

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By Kirsikka Moring
     
      While others sweat and snort behind their snow-pushers, cursing the arrival of an untimely spring dump of the white stuff, one person’s world is filled with excitement and wonder.
      Snow!
      The more the merrier.
      And the colder the air the better.
      Artist and University of Lapland Professor of Art Education Timo Jokela, 52, lives off snow and ice.
     
In early April, as crocuses are already blooming in the south, the northern skies are still not quite done yet with unloading snow on the Lapland city of Rovaniemi.
      “Fifteen centimetres!” the artist marvels.
     
For Jokela, snow is a muse, a source of endless inspiration to his artistic imagination. “Free material.”
      Jokela sculpts, saws, and moulds snow and ice.
      His studios are anywhere in the world, on the fells of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and most recently in the Austrian Alps, where he was invited by Salzburg’s Kunsthaus Nexus to create a snow installation.
      Winter art is a budding Finnish export item.
      Art museums from different continents have placed orders with Jokela at an increasing pace for ice and snow sculptures.
     
The spring sun inevitably melts the art, but that does not cause Jokela any lasting grief.
      “I have an old fisherman’s outlook on life. A man exists within the circle of nature and in accordance with the seasons. The next cycle always brings one back to the same point. Melting is normal. One does not have to fill the earth with his art”, says the Laplander, who was born in Kittilä and who has lived all his life in the north.
      “For Finns, snow has also been an opponent. Cold and ice have been the places of residence and manifestations of mythical evil ever since the fairytales of Zacharias Topelius.
      Jokela sees the winter not as a bind but as an opportunity, and winter art as a way of celebrating and declaring it to the world.
      The most important element of our northern consciousness is snow. It has shaped our everyday lives. A harsh and beautiful, cleansing element.
     
But snow is a dwindling natural resource, at least according to the climate reports.
      “In these northern latitudes the disappearance of snow is not yet a threat. Perhaps snow will now become a noticed element. It is no longer a nuisance.”
      From the northern tourism point of view, the shortening of the winter is definitely a problem.
      The Christmas tourism season starts earlier and earlier, but the first snow makes its appearance later and later. Hence ice is being cut in March to be stored for the following autumn.
      In the north there are already huge ice storages, and in households the traditional way of storing ice under sawdust comes in handy.
      Timo Jokela knows to tell that the University of Lapland has launched various research programmes, aimed at developing methods of storing snow for the longer term.
     
The tourism industry is more and more interested in the possibilities of winter art. Jokela receives more commissions than he can handle, and he does delegate some of them to his students.
      This past winter, in cooperation with artists from the world’s leading snow art country, China, Jokela created a double igloo in the old market square of Rovaniemi, a stone’s throw away from all the city’s largest hotels.
      One side of the installation represented age-old tradition, the other side modern snow architecture.
     
The Laimio snow village between the Lapland ski resorts of Levi and Ylläs has also recently brought assignments for Jokela.
      But the most important thing for the artist, who also acts as a professor of art education, is to examine and create winter art as part of the psychosocial well-being of the world’s children.
      This winter Jokela travelled to the village of Lovozero on the Kola Peninsula, in Northern Russia, where along with his students and the local village schoolchildren he created an enormous snow-park, complete with a herd of grazing reindeer moulded from the snow.
     
The snow reindeer were a part of a larger Arctic Children project, where the schoolkids from above the Arctic Circle were given the opportunity to experience through the medium of a snow chisel the shared joy of creating something while exploring the potential of their own living environment.
      The entire sadly run-down and depressed village of Lovozero delighted in the art.
      The snow reindeer gave meaning to the real reindeer, the village’s traditional but badly struggling and nearly vanished source of livelihood.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.4.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Tourists have to make do with man-made snow in Finnish Lapland (5.12.2006)

See also:
  Video of the snow reindeer being scuplted

Links:
  Arctic Children Project, University of Lapland/EU
  Timo Jokela: Snow Installations
  Lovozero (Wikipedia)

KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi