By combining painting with sculptural and graphic elements, digital tools, and algorithm-based processes, Siiri Jüris develops a hybrid visual language that explores coexistence, interdependence, and emotional connection. Working primarily with archival photographs depicting physical touch or wrestling, the artist removes these images from their original contexts, transforming them into ambiguous records of intimacy. These are interwoven with personal memories, art-historical references, and philosophical texts, and translated into bodily landscapes where abstract and figurative, organic and synthetic, and analog and digital elements coexist without a fixed hierarchy.

Jüris layers, injures, and overworks the surface not to master it, but to discover how it responds. Each element becomes an active partner in the image-making process: paint, tools, environment, and other people. Marks made by the artist’s child or by others appear within the works as traces of a concrete lived reality, tied to experiences of being an immigrant, artist, and mother, and they actively guide the painting process.

Through this practice, the artist investigates how the collective can exist within individuality, and how the presence of other hands can be sensed in a work without dissolving the singular artistic expression that holds it together. The resulting paintings hold contradictions without resolving them, staging a simultaneity between control and chance, hand and machine, individuality and collectivity.

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Genom att kombinera måleri med skulpturala och grafiska element, digitala verktyg och algoritmbaserade processer utvecklar Siiri Jüris ett hybridiskt visuellt språk som utforskar samexistens, ömsesidigt beroende och emotionell förbindelse. Med utgångspunkt främst i arkivfotografier som skildrar fysisk beröring eller brottning lyfter konstnären bilderna ur sina ursprungliga sammanhang och omvandlar dem till tvetydiga dokument över intimitet. Dessa vävs samman med personliga minnen, konsthistoriska referenser och filosofiska texter, och översätts till kroppsliga landskap där abstrakta och figurativa, organiska och syntetiska samt analoga och digitala element samexisterar utan någon fast hierarki.

Jüris bygger upp, skadar och överarbetar ytan inte för att bemästra den, utan för att upptäcka hur den svarar. Varje element blir en aktiv medspelare i bildskapandet: färgen, verktygen, omgivningen och andra människor. Spår skapade av konstnärens barn eller av andra personer framträder i verken som avtryck av en konkret levd verklighet, knutna till erfarenheter av att vara immigrant, konstnär och mor, och de styr aktivt måleriprocessen.

Genom denna praktik undersöker konstnären hur det kollektiva kan existera inom det individuella, och hur närvaron av andra händer kan förnimmas i ett verk utan att upplösa det singulära konstnärliga uttryck som håller det samman. De resulterande målningarna rymmer motsägelser utan att lösa dem och iscensätter en samtidighet mellan kontroll och slump, hand och maskin, individualitet och kollektivitet.

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Artistic Practice and Conceptual Framework

By combining painting with sculptural and graphic elements, digital tools, and algorithm-based processes, Jüris develops a hybrid language that explores coexistence, interdependence, and emotional connection. The artist works primarily with archival photographs depicting physical touch or wrestling. Removed from their original contexts, these images become ambiguous records of intimacy, woven together with personal memories, art historical references, and philosophical texts, and translated into bodily landscapes where abstract and figurative, organic and synthetic, and analog and digital elements coexist without fixed hierarchy. She layers, injures, and overworks the surface, not to master it, but to find out what it will do. Every element is an active partner in the image-making process: the paint, the tool, the environment, and other people. Marks made by her child or by others appear within the works as traces of a concrete lived reality, tied to being an immigrant, artist and mother, and actively guide the painting process. She investigates how the collective can exist within individuality, and how the presence of other hands can be sensed in a work without dissolving the singular artistic expression that holds it together. What emerges are paintings that hold contradictions without resolving them, staging a simultaneousness between control and chance, hand and machine, individuality and collectivity.

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Siiri Jüris: Artistic Statement
For this exhibition I present two paintings sharing the same motif but with slightly different renderings and assigned processes, both titled Before the Dark (I and II). They belong to the series to melt into your soil..., which explores how coexistence and symbiotic growth can be expressed metaphorically and literally through content, form, and process. Central questions are what traces collectivity can leave within an individualistic medium, and how collective touch can be used as a tool in image-making.

By collective touch, I mean every element within the process: every outside influence, every mark left by others whether physical or verbal, every comment that triggers a flow of decisions, every tool used. As an artist, one absorbs and reflects on one’s surroundings and translates everything through a personal perspective. I do the same, but I am more interested in documenting and staging those moments, giving literal assignments to the instances where something or someone has guided my creative process, rather than letting influences pass through anonymously or affect me only subconsciously. Abstract image-making through a calculated, drawn-out plan, rather than pure intuition, though intuition remains present.

There is also an attempt to find balance in a world that feels to be on fire, and the quiet, necessary hope for beauty and a better future that comes with being the mother of a young child. Hence paintings that move between anxiety and calm, the abject and the beautiful. Before the Dark I: I assigned myself the task of preserving three small elements from an underpainting made by my child and transforming them into a burning, bodily sunset landscape, using an early twentieth- century photograph of two men embracing and holding flowers in the foreground. The assignment proved more challenging than expected. The elements I chose to preserve were remarkable as individual marks or textures, but sat in difficult positions with colours that resisted integration.

Before the Dark II carries a more complex assignment. In terms of image logic, the fiery sunset landscape of the first painting continues, with a figure holding someone in their lap in the foreground. Here my task was to translate that bodily landscape into a more sculptural form. The impulse toward sculpture came from a review in Kunst.ee that mentioned Enno Hallek in connection with my frames and Swedish background. I collaborated with Martin Christensen from Mejan, who took the original sketch and used AI tools to translate two areas, the head and the embraced hands, into 3D models. From that point my entire image-building process became dependent on those printed forms. Every material decision changed in response to them, the process shifting completely around five times, working with materials that do not forgive easily. The three paintings the sculptural landscape embraces follow the logic of the 3D forms. Having already pushed so far against my usual working method, I decided to extend that resistance into the paintings themselves, resisting the overworking and refinement I usually depend on, and allowing automatism to carry the abstraction instead.