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Insita 2007 - The Winners

Insita 2007

Justyna Matysiak
Grand Prix Insita 2007 Winner

Justyna Matysiak was born in 1979 in Poznań. Since 2000 she has been participating in ‘Krzemień’ Theraphy Workshops in Poznań, where she began drawing. She currently lives in Przeźmierowo.
The prevailing themes of her works are figures, birds, animals. Most of her works are made with colored fine liners or pencil on white paper.
With her pictures Nina changes the world.The visions are reflections of familly, life, love.
The world which once seemed so familiar turns out to be somewhat else. The things your eyes have gotten used to are redefined by her pictures. She fills bits of reality with her own poetics, creates carefully plotted stories, as if from the other side of the mirror. She changes a picture into a picture, a sentence into a sentence.
She is an aesthete. The care for detail is seen in her works as well as her appearance. Floating chains of silhouettes, as if without skeletons, with small heads and weird, overgrown outfits and elaborated details give a characteristic trait to her works.
Colouring is mostly reduced to tonal nuances. It is synchronized with carefully sketched lines that look as if made of wood. Linear structures and sensitivity to colours are distinctive features of her style.
Recently, the artist has devoted herself to the theme of birds. She draws flocks and cycles of birds.

Tuula Huusko
Honourable mention

Tuula Huusko was born in 1946 and lived in Kajaani. Before she died a couple of years ago, she created a whole universe of ornamental creatures that are both familiar and, the same time, completely unfamiliar. The outlines of birds, fish or some more exotic animals confine a near-psychedelic organic universe. Some of the creatures have human faces.
Huusko broke the borders between the internal and the external; this is reminiscent of rock paintings' style where both the outline of the magical animal and its beating heart within were depicted. Primitive art either highlighted the organ that gave the animal the beat of life and was, therefore, an important symbol, or pictured the bones that held the animal upright and were the last of its remains to decompose. Huusko's creatures, however, have an inner life that is far more complicated and carnal; it is an ornamental infinity of compression, condensation and wonderful forms.
The word ornament comes from the Latin ornare and was originally related to decorating ceremonial objects. It belongs to the borders of the human and divine worlds, of the physical and metaphysical worlds. But more importantly, it opens the doors to the realm of fantasy, where human imagination is able to create more and more new forms and their variations. The idea of ornamenting is not taken to its full in Huusko's work. Monochromatic pencil and ink lines are complemented by organic designs in bright colours. The surface appears beautiful but, at a closer look, it reveals a grotesque bodily reality, an inescapable maze of stylised intestines.
Most of Huusko's figures are depicted sideways against a white background. The creatures have wings or legs, but they still seem to be stuck in their place, almost unable to move. Sometimes the feet expand to create a base, or there can be an added element, like the construction of rings in the painting of the figure with floral feelers.
Human figures seldom featured in Huusko's drawings, but when they did, the imagery only differed from her other works in that she focused on the face and the upper body. Occasionally, Huusko's animals can be in a company, but the human figures are usually either in pairs or in a crowd. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule.
Huusko, who worked as a child-minder, started drawing at an early age. She made fine plaster casts, which were, compared to her drawings, traditional and clearly show that she attended some art classes. But the classes were not for her. She developed her distinctive imagery in the early 1990s. In addition to the richly ornamented figures, her work includes drawings far simpler in style, as well as an illustrated book with informative and funny texts in which she tells about her life as a 16-year-old.
Huusko came originally from a farm in Sotkamo, in northern Finland, where she spent the first 28 years of her life. This might explain the prominence of handsome roosters, horse-like creatures and other animals in her imagery. In her book she looks back on the memorable moments with friends at dances, on the beach, picnics, not forgetting love and romance. She even included her brother's courting his fiancée in her book.
During her last years, in particular, Huusko drew frantically. She wanted to become a professional artist and even received a start-up allowance, but the success never came her way. Her drawings were shown at the gallery of a local framing shop and she held an exhibition entitled Ufo and Animals at the Kajaani library in 2002. She did not manage to sell a single work. Fortunately, her son has kept all these unique works. Perhaps now the time is right for them.

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