The Island...

"The island. The island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you've seen that, I know you have. But the island chose you, too, Jack. It's destiny."

-Lost

Hei!

On Tuesday my Scandinavian Art class went to Hailuoto, an island off the coast of Finland, near Oulu. We have been studying environmental art in detail these past few weeks and now had an opportunity to create a natural art piece in a group (we have already created individual pieces in Oulanka; i.e. my Christmas tree) Here's how it went:


We were each given two colored cards. We were then instructed to find something in the nature of the island that matched up with those colors. I received a ghastly bright yellow and a ghastly bright pink. These were definately challenges. However, I found a flower that was close to the pink and a leaf that was pretty close to the yellow. It was definately challenging. Then we all laid out our findings and discussed the task.


Then we were given the task of guiding a partner (with their eyes closed) all the way across the beach to the hut to eat lunch. We were to stop them 5 times and use them as a camera, using their eyes to "take pictures." Then we switched. It was an amazing task as we all still (on Thursday) can remember our 5 pictures.

We soon noticed the giant windmills that were placed all over the island, especially near the beach. We were told that more than 50% of the island's energy is provided, free of charge, by these windmills.

After a little lunch, we were given our big group task. We were to list whatever came to mind when we thought of Change. Any kind of change. Then we were to spend the next 4 hours creating a piece of art that represented one of our ideas out in nature. We split into groups of 4 and went all over the island searching for a spot to exercise our genius.

"Let's burn something!" suggests American Michael the pyro. "Hooray!" says French Laura, American Wade, and myself, pyros in our own right. "It will be man's inhumanity to man and his environment represented by a lot of wood burning to the ground while we sit around for 3.5 hours being bored."

"Professor Laura, can we burn something?"

"No."

Damn.

Okay, what else can we do?

We found these really neat sand piles near the beach that had been made, apparently, by huge mechanized diggers. What can we do with these? I suggest: "Let's take 4 of the mounds and use each of them to represent a season." "Hooray!" say the others.

What materials can we use to represent the seasons? These sand mounds are already covered with tons of stones and debris. We decide to use sod from a pile near the mounds as grass for spring. "We'll add some...how you say...?" says French Laura. "What is it in French?" I ask. "Feuilles," she replies. "Oh, leaves," says I. She was quite impressed. "Leaves, yes. Add leaves and berries." We decide for summer (the most difficult one to determine) to clear all the stones away from that sand pile and just use the sand itself as a beachy signifier of summer. Autumn? Let's use the red brick and some yellow leaves (suggested by Professor Laura). Winter? White, grey, and black stones to represent snow and ice. Wade will move the sod for spring. Michael will clear the stones for summer. Laura will gather bricks for autumn and I will gather stones for winter.



So we got to work.
We worked for hours. It was quite exhausting. It turned out to be a much bigger project than we had first imagined. After all the groups were done (4 hours later), we all went from group to group having the art pieces presented to us and offering our naive and uninformed critiques.











Here is our finished product. It looked much better in person. Everyone's pieces were very interesting and it was obvious that we all worked very hard that day.






I then got to practice my French with Laura at the lodge while we waited around before leaving. We spoke almost constant French for 2 hours and I only occasionally had to ask her for English. (Her English is about as good as my French, so it was difficult in two directions). She told me she was very impressed with my French and that she was almost embarrassed to speak English with me since hers was so bad. I told her that this was nonsense, that her English was fine, but she was being extremely modest. She's extremely sweet and I'm glad we got to know eachother in both of our languages.

Well, that's all for now. My next post is going to cover some basics of the Finnish language, since a few people have told me that they're curious about what the language looks/sounds like. More later.

Hei hei!

d

As always, you can view extra photos at:

Dustin's PhotoBucket!