Merike Estna

 Maria Arusoo
an essay for a book “Dawn of the Swarm”
published 2018 

It was on 8 March 2007, International Women’s Day, in a wooden building, since torn down, somewhere near the Estonian Academy of Arts. I had taken a break from painting and left the studio to attend a small party in someone’s flat, and was sitting in front of a wood burning stove when in walked Merike Estna. At that time, I was a master’s degree student in the fine arts department and Estna was an already acclaimed painter, whose kinetic butterfly paintings and fanciful mises en scène had left a deep impression on me when I was studying painting in the bachelor’s degree programme at the University of Tartu. She sat herself down at the kitchen table and I squatted in front of the stove and that was the start of a dialogue on art, life and all points in between that has lasted over 10 years and is still ongoing.

If we look back on Merike Estna’s work from the last 15 to 20 years, on the one hand we can argue that the artist has embarked on dramatic changes of direction; yet it could also be said that her basic core has remained the same and it’s only the form and medium that are in constant change and development.
Estna’s creative path began with experimental performance art while studying at Academia Non Grata, and she made her place in the Estonian art world as a third-year student at the EKA bachelor’s degree programme when she entered a painting of hers, Kaerajaan,in the Last Heroexhibition curated by Eha Komissarov and Hanno Soans. That was followed by memorable projects such as her EKA BA work done under the supervision of Kaarel Kurismaa, the kinetic painting Little Red Riding Hood:I am the prettiest girl in the worldand her first solo exhibition in 2004, Adventures of Jüri and Mari, at Vaal Gallery.
In the early 2000s, before moving to London, Estna had firmly planted herself on the Estonian art scene with her bold painting style, which fused photorealism and pop art, and her collages, where magical landscapes were dominated by over-sexualised women, men in severe-looking suits, disconcertingly nymphet-like children, rainbows, deer, horses and all sorts of unearthly creatures, as she cast an ironic eye at neoliberal consumer society. Her collages emanated woman power and straightness of spine, buxom women with bunny ears and deer antlers, half-naked men and girls on the verge of womanhood manifesting statements about their bodies, family models, gender and sexuality.
Her move to London and master’s degree studies at Goldsmiths did a great deal to change Estna’s style of painting. Her work became less illustrative and started moving more toward the abstract, deconstruction of painting as a medium and recreating meanings.
Something figurative could still be seen in her paintings, but in the London period it was becoming a provocative game of hide and seek where bushes concealed girls performing fellatio and supine couples making out and other semi-decipherable activities that the eye did not parse right away. Estna’s works were like veritable abstract natural paintings and were full of all sorts of characters dispensing love, with a strong erotic connotation and almost pornographic elements. 

2012 brought a major breakthrough and change in Estna’s work and it was the starting point of a phase that she is still exploring today.

Estna started becoming more interested in prying open painting as a medium and creating a new constellation of meanings. During her London studies, painting was considered a “conservative” medium and out of fashion, and many teachers and fellow students urged her to pursue installation and video. This only bred defiance in the artist, leading her to cling even more tenaciously to painting and start dissecting it. Through her work, she started challenging the established and clearly delineated discourse that was not making much progress – at that time, painting was perhaps too easily pigeonholed in the more conservative margins of the contemporary art world and its theoretical framework was developing more slowly than that of other media. While pursuing her master’s degree at Goldsmiths, Estna started studying the theory of painting in more depth and, in particular, she was influenced by an essay published by David Joselit in 2009 entitled “Painting Beside Itself”, where he wrote about transitive practices and the risk of reification, arguing that the former offers an escape route from the critical dead-end represented by the latter. “As the most collectible type of art, which combines maximum prestige with maximum convenience of display,” he writes, “painting is the medium most frequently condemned for its intimate relation to commodification.”

Joselit accepts this diagnosis but says that paying an artist (or art historian) for services such as lecture performance or installation is no less of a transaction that leads to commercialisation than the sale of a painting – “even if less money changes hands”. According to Joselit, the problem with reification is that “it connotes the permanent arrest of an object’s circulation within a network: it is halted, paid for, put on a wall, or sent to storage, therefore permanently crystallising a particular social relation. A transitive painting on the other hand invents forms and structures, the goal of which is to show that when an object enters a network, it can never be completely stilled.”

This intrigued Estna, and she began to see painting in a contemporary sense and find a new lease on life for it, smashing the dominant masculinity and working with paintings in a new vein already free of the constraints of the frames. She focused on positioning paintings in this newly created space, and on breaking or challenging the hierarchies between different media or discourses. What she was after was working with paintings to keep them alive and in motion through time, not so that they die at the moment of completion. As the introduction to his book In the Flow, Boris Groys relies on Marinetti’s question of why ancient Greek columns are more beautiful than a modern car or aeroplane. It seems we have a higher regard for our past than we do for our present, which is unjust and absurd, because we live in the present, not the past. But can we talk of art if its fate is the same as all other objects? In In the Flow, Groys examines how art enters the flow of time, or becomes fluid, as he calls it.

Groys says contemporary art rescues itself from the flow not by resisting but by working with the current. If all current things are transient and in motion, their eventual disappearance must be foreseen. This type of prognostication makes it difficult to produce artworks and tends to effectuate events, performances and temporary exhibitions that demonstrate the transient character of the current situation of things and rules that encompass contemporary social behaviour. Estna poses the question: how can we work in this momentary state with paintings? How can a painting reflect a situation where everything is in constant change and slippery, and yet not slip and become reified?

In particular, this was expressed in a number of games with form, where Estna hacked up and ripped her paintings, placed them in front of propellers, tore them from the frames, turned them into floors, walls and ceilings, made cakes, drinks and books out of them and asked gallery guards to wear her paintings like clothing. The biggest and most outstanding project from this period was the 2014 exhibition Blue Lagoon at Kumu Art Museum, where her paintings took the form of hand-painted books, gigantic curtains, large spatial installations, lovely kimonos and zephyr cakes.
Estna’s paintings have become performative artworks and they break the hallowed boundaries of the medium and flirt with media that have been considered inferior, such as applied art, culinary art and so on. She blurs the boundaries between everyday life and auratic art and takes an interest in breaking down and confusing the hierarchy between art genres. Blue Lagoon was one of the first projects where Estna completely broke a painting down to pieces; it was playful, inspiring and an installation that completely encompassed the space. Her initially abstract-seeming games of form and colour contained provocation and opposition to the traditions of painting; the soft and pastel character drew the viewer in and then turned everything upside down. 

In the same period, Estna started becoming interested in paintings as wearable objects. We see the starting point for this in her 2014 video Travelling with a Painting, where the artist dragged with her a gigantic canvas from the Sahara to the snowy landscapes of Tromsø. While in the Small Projects residency in northern Norway, she painted custom boots for a video, and these became her first wearable painting. In the same residency, she conducted her first experiments asking that visitors and project staff (curator, gallery guard and DJ) wear her So Soft/+Pure terry cloth bathrobes and towels to sauna sessions held as part of the exhibition. A further spin on this work can be encountered in the form of hand-painted kimonos worn by guards at Kumu Art Museum. From there on, Estna continued painting wearable paintings, hand-painted costumes and ripped scarves that melded together with her paintings and were always unique objects, also bearing the traits of Estna’s typically very sensitive approach to material. 

In 2017, Estna built on the theme of wearable paintings at an exhibition held in Art in General in NYC – Soft Scrub, Hard Body, Liquid Presence– for which she created custom sets of athletic trousers, T-shirts and bombers with all of the works on display at the exhibition printed on to them. The edition was titled Burning Starsand it was again worn by people associated with the exhibition. This time, the items were also on sale to exhibition goers, and thus the exhibition spread outside of the gallery’s space-time.Estna is creating something akin to a community to which people visiting the exhibition are also invited to join, in addition to the artists, curators and other participants. With Burning Stars, Estna’s wearable paintings became more accessible to a wider audience, as they were no longer hand-painted one-off objects but rather had a slightly bigger edition.

Participation and engagement have become more important in Estna’s work – both through collaboration with other artists and incorporating inspiring dialogue into her exhibitions, such as by creating garments for the exhibition staff and audience, and inviting visitors on a stage she has erected in the gallery or on to a painting she has placed on the floor and where she serves mysteriously steaming beverages. 

Performative painting is one of the constants in Merike Estna’s work. The performance aspect in Estna’s work is in a state of fluidity – the mobility and fluidity of the boundaries of the medium that she uses in creating her works. Painting can take whatever form the artist desires, but she always frames it through the medium of painting, whether as a stage, floor, ceiling, curtain, carpet, clothing, drinks, ceramic tiles, etc. Estna, as a transformer, sees painting as a living object. For Estna, painting is a platform that lays the possibility for communication. One of her first experiments in painting as beverage and painting as food took place in London in 2013 when the artist, in cooperation with curator Juste Kostikovaite, organised a picnic event with paintings, called Dream Island.

Estna expands the understanding of painting, it alloys life with painting and alloys painting with life. For the artist, a very important aspect in this is communication and engagement so that people would dare “come inside” the painting, sit for a while on it and talk to one another, whether on a topic such as the surrounding exhibition or some banal matter that befell them that day, while drinking brightly coloured liquid paintings all the while. 

In the Rupert residency in Vilnius, she developed a drink performance that later evolved into Red Herring, whichshe performed both in Art in General as part of the NYC Performa festival, at Kiasma in Helsinki and the Chart Art Fair in Copenhagen.
In Red Herring, the artist mixes green-coloured ingredients and, blending them with liquid nitrogen, serves them to exhibition goers.Inspired by Pushkin’s A Feast in the Time of Plague, Estna plays with our ideas of romantic forms of representation and social space.The result is a bizarre, colourful, gripping gustatory and spectral experience. Red Herringtakes place in Estna’s large-format painting kneeling banana/angel flew over my head on the 7th floor above the seabed(2017), which has been laid on the floor for the performance and on which people can seat themselves. 

kneeling banana/angel flew over my head on the 7th floor above the seabedis a vivid example of Estna’s recent painting style, which thematically and technically mixes many aspects that fascinate her at the current moment.
After a long time living in London, Estna moved back to Estonia in 2016. Returning to Estonia brought back a certain nostalgia for her childhood and coming of age in the Soviet period. A number of her works are meditations on exotic imports that were not readily available and become almost fetishised as a result. For example, kneeling banana/angel flew over my head on the 7th floor above the seabedis informed by the artist’s childhood when bananas were rare and involved waiting in queues for hours to buy them.

Nostalgia and a certain romanticism have been fixtures in Estna’s oeuvre since her first works, but now we can see more distinctly the emergence of specific contrasts and oppositions. Merike Estna’s works echo contemporary social concerns with allusions to the digital, the nostalgic and a romantic reverence for the parts of human existence that are currently mutating, melting and slipping away.
Estna’s work evokes a playful techno-romanticism that on the one hand raises questions about the ever increasing and dominant role and constant acceleration of technological progress, which Estna counterbalances with traditional manual and time-consuming techniques.

Technical perfection has always been very evident in Estna’s works. She is not satisfied by simple solutions; rather, with each new series she seeks out new challenges. In the last five years, her painting technique has been characterised by layers and masking. She composes her paintings in great detail as sketches and the execution involves layering various paint and patterns on top of each other and then unmasking various tonalities. The layered technique is also conceptually important for Estna, because she uses it to create a timeline, and the different past layers, the history, is visible through the holes left by the peeled-off layers. The painting does not evince a single time-space but rather, many phases in the form of layers. It isn’t possible to keep on erasing so that the point of origin is removed – it remains, radiating through.
Visually, this creates a very interesting, gripping result where energetic patterned surfaces thrust through each other and take the shape of organic images – examples of this include with a high pitch voice, which echoed in the newly painted gallery space for hours and hours and hours and hours (2016), Liquid rock (2017) and Collapse of the system (2017). 

In the exhibition Corporate Jungle (2015), Estna turned her eye towards how modern technologies are influencing human interaction, and she incorporated the visual idiom of the internet into her paintings. Through skilful painting techniques, Estna imitates the language we use, which is becoming transformed into short phrases and emoticons, and is increasingly taking over our written language too. In her paintings, we can find many sign language signs, comical drumstick symbols and other overused emojis familiar from messaging apps. In her paintings, these are trail guides for us; they convey incomprehensible and strange messages and float somewhere in the intermediate sphere.
All of this adds up to something of a comics-like narrative: abstract characters are in dialogue with each other as in the 69 hand-painted glazed tiles made for a 2016 exhibition in Mexico City, Nostalgia with smth for everyone; or the large-format painting Agreement(2016), which can be found on the wall of the National Audit Office building in Tallinn; or the stage-floor on display in Kunstraum in London, entitled toe, toe, toe, go, go, go (2017).

Alongside changes in the forms of interaction and behaviour models in today’s world, Estna has long been interested in work themes, especially work often associated with women, whether it is handicraft or work around the house, but in broader terms she also looks at the entire field of manual labour, positioning the work of an artist there as well. What happens with manual labour in an age of constant acceleration? One reason that Estna started using patterns as her visual language stemmed from the aesthetics of traditional handicrafts, which were often performed by women at times when they were not doing domestic chores and, as a result, she inquired into why this visual language was banished from “higher” arts. She dissects the terminological space of the work through techniques and visual motifs that she uses in her work. On Estna’s paintings and hand-woven rugs, we can see brooms, rubber gloves and plastic buckets and often her installations make use of materials from the household accessories department, be they mop handles that she uses to hang woven ponchos up on or some other objects that tend to be associated with domestic housekeeping.

The painting entitled The best rubber gloves for your cleaning needs, the best rubber gloves for clearing weeds, the best rubber gloves for the best rest (2017) and the rugs Mop upand Black gloves (2017) tell us about household chores that often get overlooked, but the brooms and black rubber gloves have an empowering impact: they encourage one not to be submissive. 

As mentioned above, another way of treating the topic of labour is through the technical solution Estna chooses for executing her works. In 2017, she created a number of hand-woven and dyed rugs that continue to explore the domestic work theme: Cleaners gloves, painters memoir, Black gloves, andMop up. Through the use of traditional handicraft techniques, Estna once again raises the issue of hierarchy and masculinity in painting.
Just as Estna melds the language of the online communication seamlessly into her paintings, so, too, does she weave oppositions and quiet resistance into her rugs. It is a resistance to constant acceleration that is carried out by using time-consuming craft techniques and oppositions in the sense of turning materials upside-down, painting hard marble surfaces for her soft rugs such as Soft values (2017) and From liquid to hard to soft too hard (2017), both of which are from the Liquid rock series. 

As in her works in general, we see a number of playful and personal connotations in her rug works. For example, in 2017’s Best friends hair will always take care, she has woven a blond lock of hair from her best friend on to a black broom handle.

In her recent work, we see more accoutrements of witchcraft, where she uses elements from nature and makes them a part of her installations. 

In a work commissioned for the 13th Baltic Triennial – an egg, a larva, a nymph(2018), which consists of an oversized mural painting, a floor of 4,200 hand-painted glaze tiles, nine vases in which beeswax candles have been placed and a nude male performer who drinks wine with relish on the tiles – she has gone even further on this theme and also cast a glance into Estonian mythology. Animals have made a re-appearance in Estna’s visual idiom, but not in a fanciful form as at the start of her career but now as powerful and bewitching mythical entities. Estna makes reference to tenets of Estonian mythology, where many creatures, even lower forms, have been given an animalistic role and it is believed that the spirits of our forebears live on in animal form. Estna’s paintings are populated by slithering snakes that have been linked to folk religions since time immemorial. Snakes are, after all, symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality and healing. Bees – life-giving, supportive – and ticks, viewed as negative protagonists in the consciousness of most Estonians as they suck themselves under your skin and communicate deadly viruses that can take over your body completely. This is also the avenue by which the idea of host body was introduced into Estna’s works. The focus at the exhibition Soft Scrub, Hard Body, Liquid Presence held in NYC in late 2017 lay more on a quasi-zombie state of remoteness or distance, and explored how our over-consumption of virtual space and submitting to the stress of competition and acceleration has provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and it pondered the zombified body as a response to today’s evolving societal structures. But the most recent installations no longer include the online connotations; they have become replaced by a wild organic quality where beeswax has been shaped into candles and painted bugs and other creatures crawl along the sprightly painted surfaces. A host body and transformations are a fluid process, where different life forms meld into one another. 

Once Estna started bringing emoticons and technology into traditional painting techniques, it is more and more readily to be seen how mythology and nature motifs are taking over. In Riga at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre exhibition Disposable Gloves Guide, her painting installations incorporated branches, stumps, beeswax sculptures that burn like candles and she expanded the perceptual level of the painting even more by bringing in the olfactory world, where she placed lilies associated with funerals and the fading of life in one gallery room while a consuming sweet smell of beeswax could be sensed in the other room.
Estna’s visual idiom has become blazingly colourful and this evokes traditional handicraft patterns in which there was no reticence about using pure strong colours; and as themes, she is introducing motifs such as life, death, cycles and transformation.  

In some respects, I see Merike Estna as an incorrigible romantic, yet not a sentimental, pathetic one, but a critically playful romantic who weaves fanciful and mythical own-worlds, invariably bearing very specific and eccentric titles, a hallmark of hers since the outset of her career as an artist. Estna’s works often convey or embody love. They contain warmth and brilliant colour, whether we are talking about rugs, paintings, china, ceramic tiles, clothing or beverages. Everything melds into one. She is a romantic who looks at the changing world through nostalgic eye, but does not pine for or cling to what is fading away but weaves it into her paintings and creates unexpected combinations. Her work has always emanated a sense of the human and the corporeal. She does deal with alienation, but it is so enveloped in the material that the viewer is drawn into an uncanny web. At first it feels safe and warm, and then, finally, layers are shed to reveal critically poignant themes.

Estna issues challenges to the painting medium around her and, indeed, to the whole world we inhabit.

For further information: http://genialmythcraft.com/