Opening day

January 6, 6 - 9 pm

In the presence of the artist

A warm welcome!

Snow is delighted to present After Life, Anna Karhu-Cormier’s ritual candle installation.

Anna Karhu-Cormier’s After Life is less an object-based exhibition than that necessary cross-pollination between nature and culture. It is a gestural ritualistic presentation with plants that are reborn as candles. A candle is lit and visitors can pause by the Burning Herbarium. The herbarium slowly disappears as people interact, burning these candles ritualistically. Brief as these candles lives are, they symbolically parallel our own brief lives passage. We witness this ever revolving cylinder of time entering into it from birth until we are released from it. We endlessly dissolve and reform. This flux of form and matter is ever present.

Each candle has its procreative design, its route or path that stems from the shapes and structures of these plants, Karhu-Cormier has brought into a renewed context. Self and other, culture and nature, remain indivisible for everything comes from somewhere.

Like culture, nature has become an untouchable, distant phenomenon we prefer not to engage with. Images of nature, images that represent culture are superseding the living culture. With plants, beeswax, essential oil and a copper plate this herbarium becomes a bridge over troubled waters. Each of us, in our own way, enacts it, and brings a point of contact to nature, to these plants, and to ourselves. This well of synthesis becomes a key to our future, how we will be able to survive beyond the mere machinations of the consumption production paradox.

Text by John K. Grande

Biography

Anna Karhu-Cormier is a multidisciplinary artist and herbalist living and working in Finland. Anna has been working with the healing plants for more than ten years. She uses scent and visual art to investigate sensorial and poetic processes between human experience and flora. Anna works with alchemical notions of transformation and natural processes of change, bringing the attention to the ephemeral nature of life. 

Anna is trained as a fine artist specializing in printmaking and sensory and site specific art. She holds a Masters degree from Falmouth University, England, where she lived and worked for many years. Currently Anna is living in Finland and working with plants and scents from Finnish nature that have been used in plant healing traditions.

A Ritual with Anna Karhu-Cormier

Anna Karhu-Cormier will lead a ritual at the gallery on Saturday, January 7, 1 PM

She believes that “Facing the unknown, a collective unknown, with peace and a meditative mind, we connect with the ever changing, molten core of life and beyond.”

All this on Stage Mother Earth  -  a nature theatre that remains as we come and go over the ages.

Saturday, January 7th, 1 PM

Please arrive latest 12.50 to find your place. We will close the doors at 1 PM.