Sirkku Ketola (b. 1973, Turku) is graphic artist who lives and works in Finland and part time in Belgium. Ketola's main technique is serigraphy, which she applies to many means and forms of contemporary art, installation, video, sound and performance.
In 2003, Ketola graduated both visual artist from the Turku Academy of Arts and Master of Education from the University of Turku. She supplemented her art studies by graduating from Academy of Fine Arts in 2009, after which she has gained wide recognition as a contemporary graphic artist. Ketola has held dozens of solo exhibitions and participated multiple group exhibitionns in Finland and abroad. She is especially known for her large-scale serigraphy installations, which have been exhibited in various prominent forums of Finnish Contemporary Art. Ketola's work Tsasouna was featured at Mänttä Art Festival in 2010, and her work Pauloissa in Helsinki Art Hall on 2014. Her two-part exhibition SHhh..! Still Hearing the Whispers of the Queen was held in Turku Art Museum 2015–2016.
Currently Ketola is tooling with a work A Body Called Paula combining serigraphy, performance and sound. The project is built around Ketola's "avatar", a character called "Paula", who Ketola herself performs and whose sound track in the performance she has composed herself. Paula is both the character producing the work and its end result: four-coloured serigraphy cordons. The work illustrates and liberates the working conditions of a graphic artist. For the project, Ketola has constructed her own instruments, a portable press, which enables the heavy process of graphic art to be transformed into nomadic space. A Body Called Paula was launched at Open Studio gallery in Toronto in February 2017. It is meant to continue 3–4 times a year until 2027, when the work is presented in a museum context in Finland or abroad as a massive installation form documenting the finished cordons and their birth process.
In the event Là-bas→ Self as the Third, Ketola presents a version of A Body Called Paula under the title Détermination 1. In her performance, Ketola observes the inner dimension and logic of her work in relation to the space of Merikaapelihalli of Helsinki Cable Factory. She investigates and demonstrates how the finished A Body Called Paula would look in ten years time were it to be installed in Merikaapelli. Therefore the work consists both of Ketola's long-duration performance, in which Paula measures the space in the form of working with black and white serigraphy, and pictures that illustrate the installation of the finished work in the future and also of the installed version of the first Paula already created for the project.
Self as the Third
