The percentage artwork commissioned by Museum and Science Centre Luuppi marks the renovation and extension of the school building, which was completed in August 2023. The school building of Oulun Lyseo, the oldest part of which dates back to 1831, is located in a central urban area and is part of a nationally significant cultural environment.
Organic in form, the sculpture creates a gate-like space in the courtyard of Oulun Lyseo High School. The work is made of laser-cut stainless steel and is stove-painted black. The black colour is a clear contrast to the school’s yellow main building. The three-metre sculpture is made of three vertical walls attached to each at the top, and roof sections 2.3 metres above the ground. On the dark surface of the sculpture gleam five small laser-cut leaves or wings of polished stainless steel.
Kirsi Kaulanen: Shelter, 2023, photograph: Mika Friman
Kirsi Kaulanen (1969–), who now lives in Porvoo, has a personal connection to Oulun Lyseo, having attended the school in the mid-1980s. The school’s focus on visual arts at the time clarified Kaulanen’s thoughts about applying for artist training. Kaulanen explains the background idea behind the work: “I was inspired by the idea of the high school as a place that prepares you to trust in your own wings and try them out. On the other hand, high school provides a shelter to grow, develop and to become who you are. I was also fascinated by the idea of a space to walk through and spend time under – while being sheltered and protected.”
Kaulanen has taken the different directions from which the work is viewed and experienced into account: from above through the school windows, from below through the various entrances to the courtyard and from inside the work. The sculpture lives with light and casts exquisite shadows. The winged vertical walls of the work consist of ornamentation shaped like the roots of endangered plants of Finnish nature. In Kaulanen’s art, everything returns to the nature within us and around us. For the artist, this connection is an inexhaustible source of creativity and a precondition of existence. Her love of nature, activated by her participation in the Finnish Nature League in her youth in Oulu, has grown and deepened into a life-long project of defending the nature through art.
Kirsi Kaulanen: Shelter, 2023, photograph: Mika Friman
In the recent years, Kirsi Kaulanen has produced several commissioned public works, the most recent of which, in addition to Shelter, include Mare Mare in Sompasaari, Helsinki, commissioned by the HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2023), the Earth Is Power relief in the covered courtyard of Lahti City Hall (2023), and The Mediator, a monument to President Mauno Koivisto in the Pikkuparlamentti park near the Parliament House (2023). Kirsi Kaulanen had an extensive solo exhibition at the Oulu Art Museum in winter 2022.
The renovation and extension of Oulu Lyseo High School was carried out by Helamaa & Heiskanen Oy, an architect office based in Tampere. The main designer was architect Maria Ahokas. The construction project was carried out by NCC.
Shelter is located in the courtyard of Oulu Lyseo High School at Kajaaninkatu 3.