Contacts is a group of ten sculptures which was first displayed in 1997 on five consecutive days in five different squares in the center of Helsinki. Contacts consists of bars which I have created by combining naturally twisted, charred pine branches and geometrical, industrially produced and painted pine. I wanted to emphasize the different, even opposed characters of basically same substance. The relation between repetition and variation served as a starting point for the project. The outcome is something both organic and artificial. Strange creatures from an unknown planet. A team of mutant athletes. Or a wandering neon forest. An urban garden where two elements, strange to one another and yet of the same substance, come into contact.

The sculptures are operating with the tension between order and disorder, thus referring to danger and something marked off. The sculptures can be read in two ways: either as a movement from the “chaos” of nature to the “ordered state” of culture or from the cultural functionality to the free rhythms of nature. In these barriers, coincidence and control are united. On the background of this work there is also an experience of ambivalence: in the late modern society, technology is trying to maintain a fictional security.

© Timo Heino, 1997