From the moment I first encountered Emma Jääskeläinen’s sculptures, I made a mental note to follow her progress. In works such as According to Shadow and Creator (New Potato and Olive) (both 2017), she mixes elements large and small, hard and soft, mineral and organic to create bold, visually poetic, and appealingly absurd juxtapositions. Though her themes may seem conventional—concerning family, emotional and physical states, the human body, music, and food—the complexity inherent in her work and its open-endedness engender multiple interpretations.
“Slo Mo Mother,” Jääskeläinen’s recent solo exhibition in the Netherlands, marked a high point in her career to date. Evoking what might be a line in a blues song, the title conveys the artist’s current reality—a deceleration of her dual roles as artist and mother. Exhibiting at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, a venerable Gothic building formerly serving as Middelburg’s meat hall, then town hall, Jääskeläinen found the perfect architectural collaborator, its stone and brick underscoring the work’s material strengths and revealing the depth of the artist’s lively imagination.
John Gayer: I’ve always liked Philip Guston’s paintings, so I was intrigued to see your work characterized as “Gustonian.” Did Roos Gortzak, who curated “Slo Mo Mother,” coin that term?Emma Jääskeläinen: “Gustonian forms” was my expression. I have liked his works for a long time, but I’ve only recently started referring to them.
JG: I found myself drawn to Repose (2021), the pink, smoking-hand sculpture, probably because of Guston’s paintings of hands holding cigarettes. Your work frequently refers to family members, which left me wondering who is represented here.
EJ: Originally, it referred to my father smoking, as well as to Guston’s way of portraying artists at work. I also tend to see all of my works as self-portraits. But since this show was about my experiences of motherhood, the hand came to represent a mother having a moment’s rest.
JG: So, giving it a non-specific title was advantageous?
EJ: Yes. While it reminds me of the titles used by some Modernist sculptors, it also adds a humorous twist. I like to play with ideas and will compose huge lists of names and write many sentences. But in the end, the works become lazy, fat sculptures that seem very clumsy; and, in a nod to Guston again, they are made in an expressive way. Though I may start with a model, the stone will direct the shape. Some more experienced stone sculptors have told me: “You’re not working efficiently. You are making a huge sculpture. You have to know what you are doing.” But I once made a scale model in clay for a public sculpture commission, which pleased me, and then I struggled because the stone felt so different from the clay. Clay possesses a softness that is difficult to translate into stone. I like when something in the stone suggests a fingernail, for example, and I suddenly know where the thumb should go, even if that means changing the object’s shape. When I look at Repose from above, for example, I see a dog on its back.
JG: Some people say they see hearts in Repose. For me, the shape of the fingernails suggests the white part of the human eye. And there must be other possibilities.
EJ: That is why I love this big scale. It feels good in many ways. I find my way while working. I feel that sculpting is at its best when it makes me react, makes me grasp something, measure it using my own body, even climb on the stone. It conveys physicality and feels like choreography or dancing. Then, at the end of the process, I wonder if the work portrays this experience. The titles I choose serve to resolve such questions.
JG: Guston used a lot of pink in some paintings, which is echoed in the “Slo Mo Mother” works, but I don’t recall Creator (New Potato and Olive) being pink.
EJ: It is the same stone; but if it’s not polished, it can have a powdery white surface. Night Studio (2021), a hand with black fingertips, refers directly to Guston. He would paint at night, and his daughter, Musa Mayer, wrote a memoir with that title. The father-daughter relationship is a third parallel. Of course, the ideas that inform his work do not run through my sculptures. But people see things in my work that I haven’t noticed. I’ve been told that they are embedded in the pieces, woven into it, and that explanation appeals to me.
JG: Motherhood, a primary subject for you, has not been a prominent theme for sculptors.
EJ: I’ve been thinking about motherhood as a subject since 2019, when I had my first child. I had also received the Kiasma Commission then, which resulted in Proper Omelette (2020), a large installation. Having a child amplified all the emotions I was experiencing.
When I was making At Her Fingertips (2022–23), the signature work of the Vleeshal exhibition, I was also concerned about how to move forward if I kept working with stone. It was important to make the work more fragmented to bring forth the idea that everything is in a state of flux. Chains, which can be adjusted, connect the fingers, the children, to the palm of the hand. The chains suggest that this is the greatest love ever, and that you’ve lost your independence. In addition to being attached to you, the children are also pulling you in all directions.
JG: It’s like the umbilical cords still exist, though the chains imply something more permanent.
EJ: While chains can represent imprisonment, and some viewers link them to the slave trade, I also know how they can be used. Chains are one of the few things that can lift these heavy stones, which conveys a physicality that I really like. Hearts, zeroes, and symbols of eternity interspersed among the regular links might encourage people to read the chains differently, see them as writing perhaps. It’s wonderful that people interpret the works in different ways, but part of what I want to say is that motherhood is not easy. It’s a very difficult job; it’s hard on the body.
This exhibition allowed only a few months of preparation time, which forced me to reconsider some recently finished pieces. For Repose, I began by asking: “What does ‘rest’ represent in this context?” I was also pleased to be able to continue working on At Her Fingertips because I wasn’t totally satisfied with it in my previous exhibition.
JG: One of the fingers in At Her Fingertips is not connected to the hand. Is that a change you made for “Slo Mo Mother?”
EJ: No. That L shape was always separate.
JG: I couldn’t help but see it as the oldest child, who has started to declare independence.
EJ: It could also be stubborn, lazy, a loser, or lonely. I like that it became this letter and looks so clumsy. One person thought it was a toe. My previous exhibition also included a roughly made egg, which didn’t really look like an egg. But then I gave it a more polished appearance and placed it near the fireplace. It became a fertilized egg being warmed by the fire.
JG: That egg is included in Long Long Longing, Unfolding the Night (2023), which also features a small felt blanket decorated with a zigzagging line of stitches that gradually morphs into an image of swollen breasts. That zigzag, with its multiple allusions, metaphors, and meanings moving every which way, describes your work for me. The marble hands suggest flesh and fleshiness, which is very tactile. I understand that you are okay with people touching the works.
EJ: I am, but it really depends on the situation. For the show at Vleeshal, I agreed that touching should be prohibited, because some parts are fragile and others are loose. People’s hands leave greasy stains on the stone. Having said that, I feel that there is a magical energy in the stone; I want to create the urge to touch, make people aware of the softness in the stone on which we walk. Like everything in the world, stone is a living material. For me, the flesh aspect is not just related to making portraits, it’s also about the feeling—how the stone has been treated and what is revealed. When I start to work the stone, I might polish a large area, which allows me to see its colors and details, all it has to offer. That tells me what I can disregard and what to reveal.
In these and earlier works, I’ve also added eyeballs. Their presence might suggest that the earth is moving, or the hand is alive, that they are blisters or moles. Like I said, I have been told to go straight to the form, to follow the lines, but making these works is a really long process for me. I might polish something, then suddenly start grinding one part like crazy and ignore another part. I like that there are moments of hesitation in the stone. I also like to offer people things to look at. I might, for example, find some lines that look like wrinkles.
JG: The pink of the marble is not the only thing that makes the works seem light; the curve that defines the lower edges of Repose creates a shadow that suggests it may be floating.
EJ: Actually, that curve has a practical reason. It provides access to the underside. I didn’t like the shadow, initially, because I wanted the work to look heavy.
JG: The lightweight appearance nearly overrides the material’s solidity and heaviness.
EJ: This material has many inspiring aspects. It reminds me of a big salami, which is simultaneously beautiful and disgusting. I originally had a huge block of Norwegian rose marble, which allowed me to create numerous hands and fingers. Then I was able to obtain smaller blocks, pieces that couldn’t be used to make countertops. Their irregularities interest me greatly. I search through these blocks by drilling them into smaller pieces, a process both violent and fascinating. The physical action, the dialogue that unfolds by wrestling with the material in this way, gradually tells me what these things will be. I’m also tickled by the little touches that will lift a boring work. A slight change of color or a bit of rounding can create an entirely different vibe.
I also sing, do sound, and see my work in terms of choreography and dance, but I have never included any of these aspects in my exhibitions. But at Vleeshal, it was possible to hold a performance in the exhibition space.
JG: How did that happen?
EJ: I have always liked to see my work in new contexts. You learn a lot from these experimental moments. Vleeshal supports experimentation, so I invited others to respond to the space and my sculptures by adding text, sound, rhythm, and movement. The writer Even Minn read “Alien Mother,” an essay that echoes many of the feelings I had in relation to motherhood. I also invited Verneri Pohjola, a trumpet player, and Joonas Riippa, a percussionist, to respond—even using the sculptures as instruments. When I first visited Vleeshal, I had an immediate urge to test the space’s acoustics. Working with the stone and the chains produced interesting and, at times, very rhythmic sounds. So, at our practice on the day before the performance, it seemed natural that I join in, which was amazing. Though I was quite nervous on performance day, trusting my intuition—being open to listening to what was going on in the space while participating—was important for me because it proposed additional ways to move forward as an artist.
JG: Listening while participating echoes what life with children can be like. That, too, involves improvisation.
EJ: It is a matter of using one’s intellect and intuition.
JG: How long did it take for Long Long Longing, Unfolding the Night to come together?
EJ: The work and its title came together in this show. I have many small felt cloths, like the one with the stitching that appears in this work. I see them as cigarettes or rolling papers, an idea that derives from a centuries-old Finnish lullaby, which likens the swaddled baby to rolled tobacco. I suppose a child’s arrival seemed so special back then that people compared it to the exotic things arriving in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Like all my works, that zigzag line, which becomes breasts full of milk, projects haptic qualities. I also envision the breasts as dog noses, since dog noses are always wet.
Since the work focused on the family, I wanted this large space to suggest the home. The fireplace, assembled with locally sourced bricks and stones, had a very small, visible fire. In addition to warming the dinosaur-size egg, its flickering adds a hint of movement. The “unfolding the night” in the title harks back to intimate moments. Together with the gigantic fingernail clippings—the crescent moon-shaped remnants lying on the floor—these elements convey the anxiety, the wait, the nights of interrupted sleep.
Since then, I have been seeing the nail clippings as a series of crescents and felt the need to pick them up and do something with them. So, I’ve already entered another phase. I am also finding the idea of recycling important. I spent time looking for small, white, leftover pieces in the workshop and used them to make the fingernail clippings. So, pieces left by other sculptors have become the leftovers of fingernails, which is kind of funny.
JG: How did you get into using the felt to produce the chubby cigarettes and volumetric coiled forms?
EJ: I was pregnant when I was awarded this large commission, and it became clear to me that I must use natural materials—nothing that could be toxic. I had also read that Finnish sheep wool was being burned, because the cost of cleaning and processing the fibers was so high; it was cheaper to import wool from abroad. Having done needle felting as a child and being attracted to wool’s softness and insulating properties, I decided to use this beautiful Finnsheep wool. I liked the idea of using craft material to make something with a big volume and obtained a huge roll of it. My mother helped me do the wet felting in Dumrum (2023), the large coil work, which was a super physical task. I remember seeing Beuys’s big felt squares at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin when my stone works began to grow larger, and I wanted to see if I could do something similar with the felt.
JG: The coiled forms remind me of working with clay.
EJ: That is part of the idea. Now, I’ve taken a part of Dumrum’s coil, which was white, and I’ve been dyeing it with rust, although my original idea was to have it look like red clay. This technique also conveys the idea of storytelling; for example, one could read something while moving around the sculpture (though I haven’t started to work on that aspect yet). The idea also links back to I Call Her Mammu (2015), a video in which I wrap my grandmother with yarn to map her body.
JG: You noted that your work is in transition right now. In what way?
EJ: I began by studying performance art but had a hard time with it and switched to sculpture. But by way of the performative act, I got into producing these objects—things that provide evidence of actions. So, making the sculptures is a way of performing and/or creating objects to be used. Now, though, I want to go back into performance, as well as to start using sound, which has been sidelined until now. I am also thinking of de-stonifying the stone, of hollowing it out to create more of a shell and working on developing different kinds of structures, using different colors and dipping the stone into oil, perhaps. I want to take this material in different directions.
Repose and At Her Fingertips are featured in “Layers,” a group exhibition at the Alfred Kordelin Foundation’s Kultaranta Garden through August 31, 2025. Jääskeläinen’s work is also on view at Galleria Sculptor in Helsinki, Finland, August 8–31, 2025. Her new commission for the Hirvensalo Parish Center in Turku, Finland, debuts at the end of August.
