Mixed Media Artists-Sculptors: Hyacinta Hovestadt, Sabrina Fadail & Miika Nyyssonen

Hyacinta Hovestadt sculpts corrugated cardboard into beautiful and fragile forms and objects. The composition and layering evidences a skilled technique honed over many years of relating with cardboard to know what this material is capable of. This perfection of sculptural technique works well with the nature-inspired open forms left unfinished or broken. This artists work has highlighted what can be achieved with cardboard which has exemplified its many elements and strengths, of what is possible through using cardboard as the primary material for a creative process.  

Sabrina Fadail specialises in mixed media work including the use of cardboard and weave with metalwork. Her artwork celebrates feminine and natural beauty while bearing witness to its commodification and marginalization. Subject, material, and maker are all socially marginalized. Her work evokes feminine strength as beauty. She creates grace, fluidity, fragility, and vulnerability through uneasy juxtapositions and poeticizes the commonplace. 
Of specific importance to the artist is nature as it is considered her muse. Her inspiration comes from personal life experience. The work of art is a by-product of the creative process, which is life itself. Sabrina Fadail centres her creative practice around experimentation and repetition, working in multiples, and series. I was struck by the beauty of this organic form, of nature’s influence and the sculptors weaving technique to construct a 3D structure which has a beauty and fragility of its own.

Miika Nyyssönen makes sculptures, paintings, installations, and computer-based arts. His work explores spatiality and different ways to express the sense of space with various means. Although his work carries some art-historical references, he aims to create the atmosphere instead of a narrative. His process often starts with a drawing, a technique he considers as the straightest way from thought to visual and material. The artist stated that impulses like personal handprint and painting gestures are his tools and when sculpting he relies upon this influence. Style of gestures varies according to the subject from impersonal flat fields to organic meanderings: repeats, manias, automation and slow or fast ways to work are also his material. Material qualities of artwork, like pigments or surface structures are important for him as they represent choices of dimensions, colour relations, tension, and interlacement of areas in picture or sculpture. I enjoyed researching this artists work and valued his capacity to be freed up to use cardboard, to be readily influenced to construct through atmosphere and emotion.