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Sari Liimatta: a poetic figuration

Sari Liimatta is a Finnish artist who lives and works in Lappeenranta.

She graduated in Jewellery and Gem Design at the South Karelia Polytechnic, having spent one year in a student exchange at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam.

Her creative talent was acknowledged in 2005 with the young artist award from the Arts Council of Southwest Finland. She received awards such as the Arts & Crafts Design, in 2015, the young artist award from the Arts Council of Southwest Finland, in 2001, as well as the amber jewellery design award, the second prize awarded in Gdansk, Poland. She exhibits regularly in several countries, individually and collectively.

Her work is mostly figurative. She creates portable pieces of very large dimensions, which function like small sculptures. She often depicts animals like bulls, deer, rabbits, camels, among others, intending to interpret the symbolism and cultural beliefs that each may contain locally. It is a colorful endeavour that has glass, gems and pearls, which decorate and embellish the outside of each piece. She notes that certain animals were already positioned in ancient cultures. Even today we may remember aspects of our commonplace environments. The animal kingdom that she depicts has also industrial materials.

The glass, which she often uses, appears to be a cold material. However, she requires vast amounts of heat during the manufacturing of each piece. That part needs to be approached with the utmost care, otherwise it can easily affect the final work.

Liimatta creates in an attempt to interpret animal powers, like toy manufactures may eventually do as well. She never has just the intention to tell stories about people or animals, without trying to tell her own at the same time.

These pieces must be received and experienced aesthetically like works of art that deserve dialogs, like a poetic work that deserves questioning dialogs on the meanings contained in each piece.

In reality, this is a complex and conceptual work that does not easily convey Sari Liimatta’s senses, ingrained for us to experience. The titles of the works help to unveil the meanings, as reading aids of senses and interpretive aesthetic adventures.

In a statement, Liimatta declares herself a reporter. She admits that she often ignores the most precious parts of the world around, trying to focus her work on the environmental and shared spaces issues. She believes that our life is only one system articulated by a rather paradoxical structure. Something comprised of tiny particles that look for balance in volatile ways.

Liimatta believes that a design piece can incite emotions, articulated with symbolic and mysterious contexts. In those moments, each object becomes a component of the field of art, emotionally touching coloured numbers that may appear on walls, in architecture, in other structures or even in nature. In other words, contemporary jewellery can also be a form of studying shape and materials.

Ana Campos was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1953. She is a jeweler and is also dedicated to research in this area. In the field of teaching, she taught design and theories of the art and design of contemporary jewelery. Until 2013, she was director of the arts / jewelery business and coordinator of the post-graduation in jewelery design at ESAD - School of Arts and Design, in Matosinhos, Portugal. It has been dedicated to curating and producing national and international jewelery exhibitions. Graduated in Communication Design at FBAUP. He studied jewelery at Ar.Co, Lisbon and at the Massana School, Barcelona, ​​as a scholarship holder at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He holds a postgraduate degree in Intercultural Relations from Universidade Aberta, Porto, which led to a masters degree in Visual Anthropology, whose dissertation is entitled "Cel i Mar: Ramón Puig, actor in a new jewelery scene". The orientation was by José Ribeiro. She is currently a PhD in philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He finished his PhD in 2014, with the guidance of Gerard Vilar. He developed a thesis entitled: "Contemporary jewelry as art: a philosophical study".

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