Dancing Together: A ballad

ArtHouse Jersey, with support from Butterfield bank, are opening the doors on a new exhibition Dancing Together: A Ballad.

This is an indoor reimagining of Kaarina Kaikkonen’s large-scale public sculpture, Dancing Together, which was created at Charing Cross, St Helier and incorporated over 700 shirts donated by people in Jersey during the summer. The newly conceived artwork, which has been re-designed to be enjoyed within an exhibition space setting, will open at ArtHouse Jersey at Capital House at a special launch celebration on Thursday 31 October at 5.30pm, and will run through until Sunday 1 December. During this time the installation will be available to view, free of charge, from 10.30am to 6pm every day except Mondays.

For this project Kaarina Kaikkonen has created two distinct works that bring together the different stories of people and their shirts – ordinary, sad, courageous, joyful, humorous – that reflect the people of Jersey. In the more intimate space of ArtHouse Jersey at Capital House, visitors are invited to get up close to these very personal sentiments, each garment holding a world of its own memory, offering Islanders the chance to truly connect with the many moving human stories that held the original Charing Cross public artwork together.

Kaarina Kaikkonen has proposed this new work as a ballad, named after the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally ‘dance songs’, telling a story through verse, and which were common across Europe and particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Great Britain and Ireland from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, later evolving into what are more often associated with the love songs of the present day.

Dancing Together and Dancing Together: A Ballad, both created especially for Jersey, are the latest works in a series of shirt installations that Kaarina Kaikkonen has created inside galleries, museums and outdoor settings across the world over the past thirty years, from Shanghai to Madrid, Santiago, Chile to Rome and across Finland and Scandinavia. Each work responds to the particular architectures, histories and natural elements of its location, recycling materials to create an  artwork that speaks to a sense of a collective ‘body’, of time suspended and a poetic reflection of memory, loss and our shared experience as humans and the different environments in which we live.

Discussing her work, artist Kaarina Kaikkonen has said: “I want to use materials that have had a previous life. Then I change it and give it a new life, a new form of art. To make beauty from the ordinary.’ This reinvention of Dancing Together into a new life, also featuring a specially created score by acclaimed Finnish  composer Päivi Takala, opens the question of what is possible through reimagining, reusing – and how from otherwise forgotten or discarded materials, can come an extraordinary, moving, gallery experience.”

Head of Programme at ArtHouse Jersey, James Tyson, said: “It’s been a pleasure to work with Kaarina Kaikkonen whose experience and life’s work as an artist is a
testament to the impact that stunning artworks can have when they are designed with a rigorous simplicity and speak to and share universal experiences of life. This has been made possible through the generosity and involvement of the hundreds of people in Jersey who donated their shirts to create this artwork. Rarely is there the opportunity to reimagine a public sculpture and turn it ‘inside-out’ to create a new artwork that allows, like after a long party, the ‘after-party’ when we sit together in the early hours and listen to a story or hear a distant song. Our sincere thanks go to Butterfield for investing in this bold and inspiring project that has enabled us to bring interesting and ambitious art to everyone in our Island for free.”

Butterfield’s Managing Director of the Channel Islands & UK, Richard Saunders, said: “We look forward to seeing the evolution of the Dancing Together  exhibition and giving the local community a chance to get closer to the stories and memories people attributed to each shirt. We echo ArtHouse Jersey’s thanks to all those who donated to this extraordinary exhibition.”

Main picture: Dancing Together by Kaarina Kaikkonen at Charing Cross in St Helier taken by Blake Watson