Stone Slabs

Photo: Ville Virtanen

I use my heritage as stonemason as a conceptual base for my artistic work.  I utilize the historical usage of stone-text-plates and seek to develop a contribution to the contemporary art discourse by carving texts, words and imagery in stone. The stone-text-plate, used for thousands of years across cultures and geographies, combined with my vocational training in which many techniques and formal aspects trace back from today to Romanesque and Gothic times, is for me a perfect vehicle to elaborate on the different contemporary implementations I intend to research.

What I make is a contemporary depiction of the world, as I see it. I am interested in the continuous shifting semantic levels of facts and things. I work in stone, granite and limestone. I carve texts and ornaments out of stone slabs. In this way, I am a descendent of a many hundreds of years old tradition of story telling and history writing by stone carving. In a time in which the lifespan of daily messages is very short I work with messages in stone, the often considered “eternal”. I am not a big fan of this word, but it does help supporting my works. This fundament gives me the freedom to do my work and concentrate on the different topics I am interested in.

Jyrki Siukonen writes in the Mänttä exhibition catalogue about Frank Brümmels exhibited stone slabs: “What Brümmel means is an already genuinely difficult story and I cannot really give helps. I look at the work and I am conveniently puzzled and do accept this. By looking for an exact purpose, we in fact can make a mistake to think that the exact purpose exists. And then we are in the trap. Not in one, that the artist has built, but in a self done. ”

(“Mitä Brümmel tarkoittaa on jo aidosti kiperä juttu, Enkä osaa antaa juurikaan apuja. Katson teosta ja olen sopivasti ymmällä, mutta en pistä sitä pahakseni. Etsimällä täsmällistä tarkoitusta voimme näet erehtyä luulemaan, että täsmällinen tarkoitus on olemassa. Ja silloin olemme ansassa, ei suinkaan taiteilijan rakentamassa vaan itse tehdyssä. ”)

Several stone slabs have been shown in Finland and abroad. The presentation is always drafted for the certain space. It varies from puristic hangings on walls to specially welded steel racks and colour framings.

Photo credits: Ville Virtanen, Frank Brümmel, Pasi Rauhala