Finnish artist Jere Vainio is the recipient of the 2024 Ecologies in the Making: Sculpting Futures Residency.

Vainio works with familiar materials and seeks to understand them from the perspective of making and unmaking. This approach stems from his experience as a skilled pattern cutter and maker of clothing. He utilises a technical approach to realising projects with bare necessities, and recycling materials and concepts, as a practice of deconstructive anthropology. His work reveals influences from various craft techniques like sewing, ceramics, and vernacular architecture, and reintroduces them into the context of art history. The resulting work is an autobiographical excavation site with layers of meaning and interpretation.

Vainio’s process of examining existence through the lens of material problem-solving has led to an exploration of the poetics of craft and identity. By drawing upon and transforming his background and skills, he creates future-artefacts.

For the Sculpting Futures Residency, Vainio will engineer prototypes for tools to expand the possibilities of material cork.