Transparent Shelters. Written by author Olli Jalonen (Translated by Eeva Malkki).

Anssi Taulu has related how, as a child, he used to enjoy spending time in the forest, at the foot of dense-growing trees. There he would carve out small spaces for himself, using a knife to cut just enough dry, low branches from the trunks of spruce trees to fit into tiny, unwalled yet sheltered cubbyholes.

They formed his own delimited territory, a niche that was separate from the rest of the world and simultaneously self-made yet part of the surrounding vastness. This elementary experience could be said to form the spatial basis for Taulu’s art: being fashioned by the artist and delimited, but influenced by the outside world.
Although Taulu’s works are very diverse and made from a large variety of materials, many of them may invoke a similar feeling. His sculptures and installations are built as carefully considered, complete and separate works, but one of their fundamental characteristics is a connection to their environment and time. The inventive use of materials, the presence of holes, and the works’ transparency, openness and airy quality link the pieces not only to their immediate surroundings but also more broadly to time and space.

Even though individual pieces are conceived to be placed within a clearly delineated domain, they are not exclusive or restrictive. With their partial porosity they manifest and open themselves as spacious shelters – often presenting a safe haven into which one wishes one could crawl. Subtle references to environmental changes, flora and fauna, natural history, and human history and time give the works a multidimensional existence.

Anssi Taulu’s work method is one of delimiting the expanse, organising chaos in some way to reduce it. He constructs tangible spaces out of fluctuating materials and, with masterly precision, builds odd territories: wasp factories, mandalas, cardboard cities. Shapes are repeated and permutated in different sizes, substances and times, and with varied references.

Taulu brings the professional expertise of a craftsman into his handling of materials. He has worked with cast iron and bronze as skilfully as with glass fibre, wood, rubber, plaster, stone and plastic. Often his main materials consist of discarded or recycled elements such as waste planks, water pipes or the shells of life rafts.

Repetition, alteration and subsequent further repetition are spiralling motifs through Taulu’s oeuvre. He has described the process of creating art and composing exhibitions as a cycle in which many of the associations awakened by sculpting merge together at the time of putting together an exhibition, before they once again splinter and begin to fluctuate during the creative process to approach the next phase of the cycle.

Anssi Taulu’s artworks contain something very fundamental, a simultaneous primal search for security and singularity that may be remembered by many from their childhoods. The experience of space is transmitted to viewers in a distinctive fashion, combining sweeping vistas with a comforting feeling of safekeeping.