Inari Kiuru is a Finnish-born, Bulleke-Bek/Brunswick-based multidisciplinary artist, designer and a mother of two young children. The key themes in Kiuru’s work reflect her Scandinavian background, arising from an intrinsic longing for a connection with nature. Kiuru works experimentally with non-precious, industrial materials such as concrete, steel and enamel, and her photographs and installations often focus on the unexpected beauty in the mundane and the discarded. Kiuru’s jewellery, objects and images are frequently exhibited nationally and internationally, and have been acquired by public collections in Australia and overseas. Kiuru has Honours degrees in Visual Communication (Curtin 2002) and Fine Art: Object Design (RMIT 2013) and is represented by Funaki.
About the Midsummer, Midwinter body of work in Old School
The making of Koivu (Birch)
The three works in Midsummer, Midwinter are inspired by Finnish traditions and landscape. Koivu (Birch) pays homage to the national tree of Finland, the symbol of Midsummer celebrations, revealing surprising tonal and textural similarities between paper debris and silver birch bark. Loosely modelled after the pattern on the fire wood from her uncles’ farm in Northern Karelia (displayed next to the wall work in the gallery), Koivu (Birch) builds upon the artist’s long standing practice of documenting and collecting debris around her inner-city suburb.
Each piece in the collage is rubbish found on a city street, mostly in Bulleke-Bek/Brunswick West; cleaned, sorted according to its colour, cut and arranged to reference the rectangular weave pattern of traditional Finnish bark works. This process, though urban, felt very much like creating an artefact from natural materials gathered in the forest, and as such became a deeply integrating experience and a key development for the artist. Please see more in the images below.
Jäähimmeli / Ice himmeli (Bloodlines)
Long ago, the artist’s mother taught her how to soak, carefully cut and tie rye straw into geometric patterns, and join these together to construct a ‘himmeli’, a Finnish ceiling ornament for Midwinter. Originally, these decorations were made from each summer’s harvest of rye during the winter, hung close the the ceiling for the coming months, and then burnt as an offering for a good harvest at Midsummer.
Jäähimmeli / Ice himmeli (Bloodlines) is a contemporary interpretation mixing traditional pattern and organic composition, fabricated from clear and painted glass capillary tubes that reflect light like frozen water while alluding to close family ties – to blood.
Childhood lake and sky
The Childhood lake and sky enamelled, sugar-fired pendants echo Kiuru’s early sensory memories of water, light and clouds on a small beach close to her family home in Southern Karelia. Two of the pieces have sand from lake Saimaa embedded in their surface, collected during the artist’s recent residency to document the environment she grew up in.
Image captions (All photos apart from 4B and 5A: ©Inari Kiuru 2024-25)
1. The artist’s farmer uncle Pekka in the forest he’s grown and tended, and using silver birch as fire wood to boil water
2. Silver birch bark and Bulleke-Bek/Brunswick rubbish side by side
3. Gathering and processing debris for the the work, September 2024-March 2025
4. Detail of Koivu / Traditional woven birch bark craft (Photo: Adobe licensed stock)
5. The artist in a birch grove, Finland (Photo: Katja Immonen) / Koivu (Birch)