Emma Luukkala

Jobs I’ve done today: swept the floors, folded the laundry, and moved things from place to place. From somewhere, I can hear a blackbird singing.

In her HAM gallery exhibition, Emma Luukkala ponders the overlap between the sacred and the everyday. Life flows in endless piles of things and to-do lists, with moments of meaning, intense in their brightness, at the heart of the chaos. Not even the grandest and most solemn situations are pure and uncontaminated by the outside world – they are always adorned with everyday chores and annoying dirt. Luukkala asks what sacred could mean in a new materialist context, where the world is not divided dualistically into the superior spiritual and the inferior material, but instead consists of a wide range of intertwined players.