In many of his works, Timo Heino has emphasized a kind of democracy of materials. In the works of his first private exhibition in 1991, he interspaced natural materials such as bark, fur, and beeswax with brightly colored strips of Plexiglas in a strictly geometrical rectangle. For instance, in Pimentola (a Finnish name for the place of the dead in mythology) and The Altar of the Toiling People, green and red rods of Plexiglas are accompanied by birch bark and pine.

On a surface level, the juxtaposing of industrially produced plastic and natural materials illustrates the tension between culture and nature, the artificial and the organic or the original. To Heino, however, the word forest in the title of the series implies a double meaning. Ethylene, one of the components of acrylic plastic, is organic in its origin. It is a hydrocarbon, derived from the refinement of oil. Thus, the materials from the Finnish forests in the artworks are juxtaposed with prehistoric forests, distilled as oil over millions of years and present in the Plexiglas.

© Marja Jalava, 1991