Jaakko Niemelä has been working as a visual artist since the 1980s. He works in his hometown Rauma and in Helsinki in a variety of media, including graphics, spatial, light and video works.
Niemelä has studied fine arts at Kankaanpää Art School and light architecture at Aalto University. The artist, who was awarded a State Prize in 2005, has also created several public works, including Counting numbers (2004), located at Talvikankaan School in Oulu.
Towards spatial expression
At the beginning of his career, Jaakko Niemelä focused on drawing and graphic art. Two years after graduating from Kankaanpää Art School in 1987, he had a solo exhibition at Strindberg Gallery in Helsinki. There he exhibited graphic art and his first spatial work, in which the artist wallpapered the walls of the gallery room with skull pictures. Art critic Timo Valjakka praised the installation in a magazine review, giving the young artist the impetus to move towards more spatial expression.
Today, Niemelä’s work is always spatially oriented. The artist names light and scale as his most important tools. Large-scale structures, such as lowered or collapsed ceilings, have been a key element in her recent work, transforming the spatial experience into a physical one, often directly affecting the emotions.
The works are constructed in the Rauma shipyard, where Niemelä’s studio is located. The shipyard serves as an inspiring environment where the artist has been able to observe the construction and movement of large ship blocks for many years.
Nostalgia is a journey in his father’s footsteps
Since 2012, Niemelä’s artistic work has focused on a project called Nostalgia, which deals with seafaring, ships and personal memories of his sea captain father. In his works, Niemelä uses the ship as a metaphor and visual frame of reference to make emotional content visible.
During the Nostalgia project, the artist has travelled in his father’s footsteps on ocean-going ships and visited the places he visited. He has documented these journeys through drawing, writing, photography and video. Like his father, he has circumnavigated Cape Horn, visited the Svalbard, and sailed on his father’s ship Moshulu, now a restaurant ship in the USA. Niemelä has also crossed the Atlantic to test an ocean storm – and succeeded.
For the artist, the ship is a refuge, and he is still at sea. On small boats, as they say in Rauma.
