Pauliina Pöllänen is an artist and a PhD candidate at KMD. She graduated 2012 from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo and received her BA from ceramic and glass design in 2006 from the Kuopio Academy of Design, Finland. In recent years Pöllänen has exhibited at the Uppsala Art Museum in Sweden, Trøndelag senter for samtidskunst, Design Museum in Helsinki, and the Victoria & Albert Museum among other places.

The exhibited works are part of her artistic research project Poetics of Containment where she explores the different dimensions of the relief form, a medium that can be seen as a hybrid between sculpture and painting and which holds a specific place in the history of ceramics.
 

Tunnel Rather Than a Foothold

Imagine trying to proceed on onerous terrain, it is raining as usual,
slippery stones, looking for cracks, fractures,
anything really to latch onto,
to be like a little mountain plant that spreads
its lean roots inside of humdrum bedrock,
extend the tips of your limbs to find the limits of your reach
to follow a line on a cusp of something.

Hang in there to get a breather,
to absorb few drops of dew of the condensated mist through your 
capillary system,
feel your own porosity before threading further,
flux taking form.

Has the water found a small crack before you, alone in a tiny pocket,
filled a pouch, formed a pool that froze, eroded and expanded its edges,
found another way to take care of itself.

If you can try, climb up the wall by placing seeds on something
which at first feels like a rather generous recess,
nurturing the stems about to be birthed, twines on the verge of spring.
What looked like a flat plane, after not looking for a while,
can be pushed yonder, coil in a cove, branches can trail this hard soil.
Where have you arrived, can you carry on.

Tunnel your way through dirt, now the inside connects with the outside,
rainwater drizzles in,
as above so below, no not a catacomb, maybe a passage.
Where bodies of water mix and expand,
togetherness ebb and flow,
drip and spill,
deeper into the unknown.