Back to the Roots

Sanna Myrtinnen with The Support of The Substation Presents:

a new earth Dates: 2 to 11 July 2009
Times: 11am to 8pm daily
Venue: The Substation Gallery
Admission: Free

Back to the Roots presents a unique environmental arts project bringing together the hopes and environmental concerns of nearly five hundred students from across the world.

The project is the result of an extensive one-year collaboration between the Finnish born painter Sanna Myrttinen, the world’s largest primate rescue project called The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), its founder Dr. Willie Smits and the students of Munich International School, Germany.

Dedicated to BOS, the show aims to raise awareness of how deforestation adversely affects the Bornean rainforest and its endangered inhabitants. Back to the Roots is a subtle plea to save the remaining pockets of paradise and is an appeal to us all to start taking action for a more sustainable, new Earth.

The children’s messages and imaginative painting run like a red thread throughout the show and form the basis for Sanna Myrttinen’s playful, bold and subtly thought-provoking work.

The works range from colorful collages based on paintings by children in primary 1, to delicate woodprints and large, impressive mixed-media patchworks of poetry. Each piece is the result of a group effort between the children and the artist with a clear focus on our rainforests and on how we can help to sustain them and their inhabitants.

The artist along with the German and the Finnish Embassies of Singapore will be jointly opening the exhibition.

For more info:

	A Pocket of Paradise: Sanna Myrtinnen & students aged 7 to 16
	“Once There Was Paradise” consists of 20 small collages of various sizes. The series contains motifs that were cut from 100 paintings created by children in Primary 1. Each child painted his/her vision of an intact rainforest then Sanna cut out the motifs, rearranging then on a canvas, turning them into this series of colourful collages. Each painting contains motifs from 6 to 10 children. This series has been sold in advance of the exhibition opening.
	“Shimmers of Hope” is a series where a group of Primary 2 children painted canvases in the “wildest imaginable colours, shapes and images that they associate with rainforests”. Sanna then took all the canvasses and outlined every image in these paintings, blocking out everything else in black. She began to process these images by adding the children’s poetry and reflections on the current state of the rainforests.
	“Sunbird”