Describe the feeling: Energy (food / organic matter) going through my body, my colon. Soil (food / organic matter) going through the worm’s body. A neat pile of poop after us. Soft and flexible tunnels that are our bodies. Slowly, twisting around each other, humidity, and us reaching towards the rhizomes or them reaching to us.
Alma Heikkilä is fascinated by the collective activities of soil creatures; from nematodes to fungi, spores to mycelium. Heikkilä’s artistic work evokes a deep sensorial knowledge of ecosystems and the interdependencies of myriad organisms in mutual co-existence. Finding form in sculpture and large-scale painting, she strives to create a space for humans to imagine an up-close encounter or experience with the invisible processes that occur in the soil, often at a microscopic level.
For her solo exhibition at Grazer Kunstverein Heikkilä presents a newly produced body of work, radiating around a macroscale double-sided painting, titled found living in total darkness. This painting is a luminous meditation on the processes that take place in slow continuum within soil organisms nestled under the surface of the earth. In paint and plaster Heikkilä portrays webs and filaments, microbes and insect life, depicting rhizomatic structures of interdependency and symbiosis. She is interested in non-human agencies of change, for example the role of soil in the climate crisis. Through her painting and sculptural work she illuminates these largely imperceptible biotic communities in order to focus our attention towards their dark and complex ecologies, not only beneath the forest floor, but also inside our bodies.
