30 April–26 June, 2004

Mourning´ is a series of installations by Finnish artist Jaakko Niemelä at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery.

For his first exhibition in Ireland Niemelä has completely transformed the lower gallery of the Crawford and divided it into several areas. Each area is a dark space in which a distinct story is told.

Characteristic of Jaakko Niemelä´s work is scale: the relationship and tensions of small and large visual and audio elements. Other themes such as childhood plays and playing, concepts of memory and control also inform his work.

“There is a constructive drive in the works of Jaakko Niemelä (b. 1959). Not constructivist or formalist, but constructive in its purest sense. He builds, assembles, amasses, disassembles, and reorganises. The world is recognisable with all its bizarre details, but somehow different.

A lot of his works have involved toys. It could make you jump into the conclusion that he is a particularly childish artist. This might even be true, but is beside the point. Just as childhood can be just as full of pain and horror as any other period in life, the works of Jaakko Niemelä construct, reconstruct and represent dark emotional landscapes from a world of toys. These are the killing fields of growing up, but involving the playful act of mock and caricature. The city is reinterpreted as a miniature, equipped with surveillance cameras and the sounds of modern warfare and of popular fiction - sounds produced by the toys themselves. He distorts the scale by projecting minimal details into huge formats. The worlds he builds are strangely alien, though recognisable in every detail.”
Pontus Kyander, Art critic, curator, Chief editor, SVT Bildjournalen

The exhibition has been made possible with the support of The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (Frame), The Finnish Institute in London, Sirius Arts Centre and Suomen Kulttuurirahasto.