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Icy Prospects / Jorma Puranen

In Icy Prospects the sublime is understood as the extreme and highest yet ambivalent form of human experience, related to an appealing transcendental feeling of beauty. The sublime is also associated with the feeling of danger in strange landscapes, the perspective of the stranger. In this work, almost hallucinatory visions are like the echoes of ancient expeditions in the Arctic seas. I am reminded of the story about Turner, who had himself bound to the mast of a ship to experience the extremes of a storm in order to paint the world in a more credible manner.

This work is associated with new concepts of space, mobility and distance that have emerged in cultural studies. I was interested in the possibility of a cultural space created by different fates, places, histories and encounters, a fictive historical world. Icy Prospects is a kind of fabric of facts, fantasy, geographical imagination and intellectual landscapes.

I have worked in the North for thirty years on projects connected in different ways to the relationship between history and the Arctic landscape. In addition, I remember from my childhood my father's stories about the Arctic Ocean when he worked on fishing boats in Petsamo until the outbreak of the Second World War. The trawlers would go as far as Bear Island, situated between Spitzbergen and the Finnmark coast. The North, that highly elusive dimension, is perhaps more than a spiritual home. It has shaped me to become what I am.

Icy Prospects is the last in my series of projects on the northern landscape. It is naturally related to a stage of studying art and culture in which questions concerning space, the landscape, have partly replaced the body as the locus of complex considerations of identity, cultural difference, marginality etc. There is now simultaneous interest in contemporary art in both mobility and attachment to a place. Narratives of place and unattachment now have a central role. Places, landscapes and their images are also important political metaphors.

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