Lanton ripset means «Pond’s eyelashes» in Finnish.
I made this installation for the town of Ivalo, in Northern Lapland.
I composed these nine sculptures with wood found nearby Koppelo, the village I lived in for a year in 2021. I chopped the fresh long birch trees growing on my swamp, and made the signs from the dry branches of a snag, which is a standing, dead or dying pine tree, called « kelopuu » in Finnish. I did the balance tests in my backyard, and afterward installed the sculptures with the help of my barge and work Kalastusruuhi around the « Haravalanto » pound in the town of Ivalo. I sprayed the signs with almost invisible luminescent painting, so they would glow in the dark. The installation stayed there for a year, from July 2021 to July 2022.
The main intention of this piece is to embody my interest related to the history of writing systems. I wanted to compose a collection of signs which retains their meaning in an open reading proposition. Everybody could come up with their own meanings for each work by encountering them while walking around the pound. In the process of their installation, the sculptures just settled themselves, held their own balance through the choices that I made when composing them from the dead branches. I was influenced by the weight, the form, the size, and the assembly potential of each piece of wood.
If I compare them to the writing systems that exist, they could be logograms: multiple meanings contained in one visual sign. The difference with the signs of Lanton ripset is that they don't contain any precise meaning. They hang up between the letter and the drawing, evoking the evolution of writing, from physical things to their representation.
Above all, they are outdoor sculptures, rotating in the ends of the chains, never readable regularly because of the weather, their own reflections on the water, the huge changes of their environment in Northern Lapland caused by the snow in the winter, the sunny nights the summer and so on.
Finally I couldn’t define them in precise and just words, cause for me they are works that are questioning plurality of languages, for some residents belonging to religious cults they were satanic signs, for birds they were perches. They lived there for a year, visited by animals, snowmobilists, and children skiing around the pound.
Video, creation of the signs
Video, installation of the signs
Video, winter