Welcome to the Homepage of Mikko Snellman !

 

I am a visual artist as well as an art educator and a researcher of art education.

 

My visual artworks consists of paintings, collages, installations and performances. In my art I feel very comfortable with paint and contours, lines that speed up the motion of a hand. The colours are forces that expand, inhale and exhaust the lines through out the canvas or paper field. I do also like to add forms on the surface like stryrofoam or corrugated cardboard. My technique is to draw and paint on photographs and follow the machinic lines of the camera and expand this recognizable image-making with unknown territories of the real figuration by vivid colours and vibrating lines. I use also readymade objects and textiles. I combine figurative and abstract expression.

​

I have also done some experimentation with more space-oriented painting, i.e. installation art. First these were like curtains in windows with collage technique and acrylic painting, for example Ballroom of Delights (2000).  But later more like installation with ready-made objects. They can be seen also as mini-exhibitions or mini-collections of paintings, sketches and objects. The latest of these is called Peripheral Nerve and it consists of the material found from the Art School were I used to work in Kauhajoki, Finland 2006-2013, the map of the world and collage made with photocopies from the medical study book called Traumatology.

​

The most recent pieces  at the moment I'm working on, relate to images of a male body and its cultural representations. But I want to challenge this rigid system of a "accepted" male through the materiality of painting. I hope there opens up a smoother space for masculinity and femininity and some other spaces too from the animal and organic realms too.

 

I have been teaching for many years art and various subjects close to it (art education, philosophy and aesthetics, modern and contemporary art, eastern art history). In pedagogy I'm interested in experiential and experimental learning. Through contemporary art and its strategies it is possible find new ways of learning and teaching.

 

As a researcher of art education I am interested in experiential learning, new materialism and bodily knowledge and affect. In my dissertation Echoes from the Dark Forest: Affect in learning contemporary art and (in) the ecology of subjectivity (AALTO Arts BOOKS 2018) I have researched a contemporary art workshop in which the students produced environmental and installation art as well as performance. This was done in a relatively free method and experimenting. The methodology can be described as rhizomatic. Very important aspect in this study is also the ethico-aesthetics of research and art.

​

In which way would one manage a workshop of contemporary art? What kind of affective-material space would there become? And how would one enable the ecology of subjectivity in a workshop? In which way can the subject be approached from the viewpoint of ecology? With these questions I refer, in particular, to posthuman, new materialist discourse.

​

As the conclusion of my dissertation, I have described the preconditions, experiences and encounters of activities of the ‘affective pedagogy’ both inside classrooms and outside. In addition, I have also pondered the direction of the future workshop. Teaching performance art and other fields of contemporary art acquires the ability to throw oneself towards the unknown by both the teacher and the students. One has to start rethinking also the person's subjectivity by which the activities alter, too. Often too much talking and controlling used by the teacher make the real encounters and listening to one's experiences disappear under the heavy noises. For example, encountering of something new and even odd disappears. In such a case silence is the most effective means in challenging the common teaching methods.

 

​