Interview with Tuomas Korpijaakko
The great thing of a place like bookdummypress is to have an opportunity to get to know and support artists that ask questions, poke life, embrace it, change it, improve it, they make their mark upon it by making art and put it out there for us in a book form.
Tuomas Korpijaakko is one of such artists and it is a great pleasure for us to feature him and his work. Tuomas’s books possess a special kind of harmony, they float, they don’t try to seduce you, or deceive you, they don’t pollute but calibrate your mind, they are almost invisible.
bdp: What is the function of an artist studio for you?
TK: The studio functions as an arena to exercise/exorcise what otherwise might not be worked out/dispelled in relationships surrounding the social, family, work, or home. That’s not to say it can’t also function as a meeting place for all of those things.
bdp: Why do you make books?
TK: I believe making books has kept my practice open to ideas and collaborations that could easily have been dismissed by a tendency to constrain certain paths of thinking. Because I have created mostly self-produced publications, there remains a more reflexive process of working that I have become partial to.
bdp: What do you think is the connection between your books?
TK: Each publication I produce stems from either a conversation that has been initiated through an exchange of material with other artists or the relinquishing of ideas that seem to clog up my own working process. At times the connection between these projects seem to be more of a breaking away with what I believe is the right idea in order to follow suit and see what questions and/or conditions take over in order to
discover otherwise unexplored trajectories.
bdp: When you work on a book, when do you consider it finished?
TK: I will leave things lying around for some time, have others look at them, ask their thoughts, etc. in order to see if my intentions are clear. A book is finished when it feels settled in it’s concept and design yet unresolved enough for me to keep coming back to it to ask more questions. I think I restrain my idea of what is “finished” in order allow room for the next idea to come in.
See Tuomas’s work from here→http://www.tuomaskorpijaakko.info/http://www.tuomaskorpijaakko.info/
Tuomas’s publications are now available at bdp bookstore.
http://store.bookdummypress.com/artist/tuomas-korpijaakko