The Pirkkala Sculpture Park, which has no gate, no entrance fee, not even a sign, spills out from the center of town into the backyards and sidewalks of Pirkkala, forty-seven miles north of Helsinki, Finland. “We’re putting this town on the map,” grins one of the artists invited by curator and local art hero, Villu Jaanisoo, the forty-year old Estonian artist who lured twenty international artists to participate in the 2003 Sculpture Symposium and Iron Pour, a three-week residency and workshop which generated the inaugural collection.

Without an office, much less a Board of Directors, Jaanisoo convinced the town’s municipal government months ago to invest in his curatorial debut: the creation of a “borderless” sculpture park. Having participated in numerous sculpture symposia throughout the world, Jaanisoo knew he could populate the Park almost instantly by staging a Symposium and Iron Pour where room, board, and materials are provided for participating artists. However, he refused to limit the range of work by medium (cast iron), and actively recruited artists whose approach to sculpture goes beyond the boundaries of tradition. “At first, sculpture was bronze, stone, and wood, and now it can be sugar cubes, shit, or signs, or things we haven’t seen yet. Sculpture has changed more than anything and that’s exciting,” enthuses Jaanisoo.

The resulting collection includes a modest range (given the three-week time limit) of three-dimensional work including thousand pound metal forms on pedestals as well as a decaying cow horn installation, site-specific work involving a Finnish shed, and a forty-foot high sculpture made of steel fencing and zip ties.

The Iron Pour, which starts late in the endless “Midsummer night,“ draws local townspeople, foundry workers, and news media, fascinated by the “cupola,” a miniature blast furnace based on a Medieval model. The cupola design, introduced to Jaanisoo by American sculptors, is hand-made from contemporary materials (think metal barrels and duct tape) à la Dr. Seuss. The Pour introduces this rogue casting method to art students and foundry workers who watch in awe.
Indeed, the furnace steals the show as volunteers (mostly art students from the symposium), draped in full-body leather gear, collect the spewing molten iron into a heavy bucket carried by two people who pour the fiery red liquid into dozens of black sand molds.

Most of the molds, ranging from five to fifty pounds, belong to the art students whose works are exhibited at the end of the symposium. Larger works by symposium artists are cast off-site at local foundries. This alone was a coup for Jaanisoo who deftly talked his way into gaining access and free labor from the pristine industrial factories. “It’s about personal connections?talking, joking, and explaining the art. It’s not so much about money. It’s about how particular factories want something else, maybe a piece from me,” grins the wily Jaanisoo from behind his spectacles.

Despite the odd hours of access to the factories, sometimes at three or five in the morning, a handful of artists jumped at the chance to cast their molds (in bronze, steel, or aluminum), a process worth thousands of dollars. Coral Lambert, a New Orleans-based British artist, cast her one and a half ton steel Isolammi (Big Water) at “one of the biggest steel factories in that part of the world,” normally used for casting submarine parts. “Due to insurance reasons I was only able to do a minimum amount of labor at the factory; I could be there as a director. This involved a different set of artistic skills needed to steer my desired outcome. For example, my foam pattern was unconventional and, as the sand was packed onto it during the sand mold process, it was designed to compress and the form would become more pronounced through the process. The workers had not done this before so they had to feel they could trust me. Even with the language differences, a mutual respect built up. When the translator had to run off, sign language worked. We also had the same steel-toe sandals, which helped,” Lambert recalls.

Yet, other artists felt strongly that the material cost to the municipality was minimal compared to the value of the artwork, donated or on loan, to the town. “It certainly has cost a lost an awful lot of money and effort and time and hours from the city for all this to happen. But they also got a hugely valuable product. Huge! They couldn’t buy this stuff. There’s labor from the artist but that’s not really the value. The value is in the concepts and the years of profession behind the work,” says artist John Ruppert, Chair of the Department of Art, University of Maryland, College Park.

Jaanisoo and his wife, artist Hannah Vihriälä, view the symposium as a micro-community where artists network, philosophize, and mentor younger art students. “Most of the time as an artist, you’re alone. It’s really lonely work and the whole idea of a symposium is to come together” says Vihriälä. The artists and dozen students lived, worked, and ate at the Nouliala Elementary School where even the largest of egos had to crouch gingerly on tiny plastic chairs in the children‘s cafeteria. “We think it’s important that students learn how to do their own casting and how to do it cheaply. It’s one of the reasons we started doing these workshops and it grew into this symposium,” Jaanisoo explains.

And now, after the flurry of artistic activity, the town of Pirkkala plans to continue producing a Sculpture Symposium every two years, and establish a yearly residency program with one or two artists at a time, either with Jaanisoo or another curator.

According to Jouni Salonen, Pirkkala Secretary of Cultural Affairs, the town was not always so supportive. “A few years ago, some really opposed the idea of cast iron sculptures in nature.” Perhaps overcoming that battle gave Jaanisoo the desire to show the town more than just cast iron. At the end of the day, the Pirkkala Sculpture Park is Jaanisoo‘s lesson, “to show the people what sculpture is, what sculpture can be.”

Allison Hunter is an artist, writer, and Web designer based Houston, Texas. More information on the Pirkkala Sculpture Park can be found at www.pirkkala.fi/sculpture/.