Anna Rikkinen
Photos Anna Rikkinen
Engaging her work with themes of memory and the interlayered nature of western culture, Anna Rikkinen’s (b. 1976) art is informed by references to art history, adornment, and popular culture. Rikkinen uses bricolage-technique, which combines materials of nonvalue to concepts of value, more recently, her own early works are turned into sculptures and installations. Her work is tinged with nostalgia and melancholy, tempered by gentle humour and poetic irony.
A Portrait Installation
Creating body-related objects and installations, Anna Rikkinen plays with the language of volume and space to evoke the body by mixing jewelers techniques and versatile materials including, wood, glass, textile, and ready-made objects.
Bonbon Baroque –book Anna Rikkinen
Through the layered structure of her works, Anna reflects on the concept of decoration, body, memories, and time. Her art engages in the study of materials and the messages of they convey. Rikkinen creates art from materials that others might not deem worthy of consideration. With ready-made objects, wood, glass, textiles, metal, paper and scrap, Anna explores shapes, techniques, and functions. Her wearable sculptures play with historical concepts of ornamentation. She generates links between jewellery, body, and space. Her art exists in a richly contrasting interplay between imagination and scale. The works bring into focus issues pertaining to human, especially female, subjectivity.
Anna Rikkinen began her studies with practical stone and jewellery smith’s education in 1997 in Lappeenranta Polytechnic in Finland, followed by studies at the renowned jewellery department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam graduating 2004. Rikkinen has exhibited widely around Finland, the Nordic countries, Europe, and North America. Her works are represented in private and public collections.
She currently lives and works in Lahti, Finland.
