Denise Ziegler: Features of the Poetic | Taidehalli

When you walk in the streets of a city, you may notice houseplants in the windows of offices or residential buildings. You may imagine how people have, each in their own way, placed the plants on the windowsill. After the plant is placed on the sill, the pot is often turned slightly to optimise its position relative to incoming light and other plants in the room. Putting a houseplant on a windowsill is an unobtrusive, mundane, yet very carefully executed gesture. This gesture forms the starting point of the work Field Trip for Houseplants.

Denise Ziegler's works are traces of gestures, human activity, something that has happened. Ziegler reconstructs situations of mundane or unobserved human behaviour and transfers them into a new context. This gives rise to conflicting and poetic, sometimes even comical or tautological features in the works. Ziegler's situational reconstructions usually result in three-dimensional assemblages of objects, but also include drawings, videos or literary-visual works.

Features of the Poetic is a part of Ziegler's doctoral research project for the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibition coincides with the publication of a book of the same title, in which Ziegler discusses the connections between her mimetic practice and poetic expression.

Denise Ziegler was born in 1965 in Lucerne, Switzerland. She began her art studies in Lucerne in the Abteilung Freie Kunst at Schule für Gestaltung in 1986–90. Ziegler has lived in Finland since 1990. She graduated as a Master of Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997. Ziegler has held solo exhibitions in Finland and in Switzerland.