Puska – Bush – is thus named to tell of the setting of this exhibition.
I didn’t want to have themes or other additional names that would have salted and cured this year’s exhibition and would have made me define the themes and framework with an unwarranted feeling of importance. The exhibitions of environmental art that I have seen are often beset by a slight bleakness, amateurism and the seriousness of someone who’s swallowed a poker.
It was a joy to disqualify from the outset pourers, casters and stonemasons lodged in their mould, and to cast them from the bushes to the motorway siding. Instead of self-sufficient choices of material, the focus shall now be on the joys and cartwheels of life right now.

The choices of materials and themes by the artists of Puska mainly involve feelings of temporariness, fragility and even otherness. The works may also change along with the summer and the laws of the jungle.
I’ve invited artists of today and tomorrow who are able to produce, by combining different ways of experimental sparkling, imagery and being that will even bring sweat to the back of a lumberjack’s neck and make old ladies blush.
Unlike the populism occasionally offered in the domains of art, we’re not offering Eurovision song contests or making misses of works any more than their makers.
Good won’t become best by giving points, not even behind the woodshed.

I regard myself primarily as a board painter who never makes a single painting but does real work that may change, once having gained speed downhill, into something like an ant path twisting along the side of a stream and carrying on all the way to the gates of the dump. Assembling this group, I also bit, high on crispbread, on something where children and young people might become interested in art alongside skateboarding and chilling.

Down with deplored elitism in art, for art is in dire need of a new fresh audience, who now has a table laid in a new setting and a new package.
Nothing for it but to find a blade of grass for your mouth and to step inside into the light of the image, for the art of Puska is from heaven.

Puska, capital of environmental art since 2007.

On the fifth floor at Merihaka in Helsinki , ( - 18 C  ) 6 February  2007

Recommending myself to you, 

Harri Kivi

Prime mover of the Taaborinvuori Summer Festival of Environmental Art