S.T.O.R.A.G.E: HEIDI KILPELà„INEN

About

Heidi Kilpeläinen, also known as HK119, has been recognised internationally as a performance artist as well as an exceptional musical performer. Paralell to her musical career, which she is currently pursuing with the record label One Little Indian, she completed her MA at St Martin's focussing on stage and sculptural construction. After an array of shows presenting her Gesamtkunstwerk inclusive performance, costume, stage design and video art, she began developing a strand of paintings and sculptures, which function independently of her stage persona. Influenced by the aesthetics of modernism, she began re-examining the essence of modernist stage design. Futurism and most importantly the impresario and writer of the first futurist manifesto F.T. Marinetti as well as the artist Giacomo Balla created the first stages for a continuously influential futurist theatre. Kilpeläinen continues this legacy as well as taking her cue from Bauhaus and Constructivism to develop her ceramic, wood and steel sculptures. Her works are final sculptures in their own right, re-interpreting modernist formalism in a current manner and yet also taking on board the temporary and indeed spontaneous nature of the Balla and Schlemmer designs, which were flexible and intended for stage use. Not all of the models these artists and their peers designed were realised for the theatre, neither are Kilpeläinen's pieces. They are beautiful sculptures in the small scale, akin to models which may be subject to change, yet, made of materials such as un- coated ceramics, turned alder wood and machined steel they also present precious sculptural constructs which have a fragile but formally intended presence. Occasionally mixed with tufts of wool, which hold the precarious structures in place, the works have a feminist quirk to them, which is both toyingly seductive and a firm critique of the more technical nature of its predecessors. The fact they might be also be models for larger scale stages on which performances can take place makes them more tantalizing. Kilpeläinen plays with the endless possibilities of the entwinement of sculptural practice and stage design.