Wildness Makes This World

Abstract

As an artist who is usually engaged with folklore and its performance, especially “Wildman” characters as they appear in folk rituals across Europe, I am especially interested in the connections between wildness, folklore, and the marking of place. In the exhibition Wildness Makes This World, at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki Finland, I worked with a group of 12 local people to mark places that defined wildness for them personally and communally. The product of these conversations between myself as an artist researcher and each participant was an artwork that was included in the final exhibition. The title of the exhibition project takes up William Cronon’s suggestion that wildness “can be found anywhere.” It was a presentation that approached the concept of wildness as it relates to the folklore of everyday life, place, and memory and attempted to articulate this as an exhibition. In this chapter, I reflect on this project and how peoples’ experience of wildness is connected to points of folklore and personal significance.