“No Man is an Island”: Uniarts Helsinki Printmakers’ John Donne Project at IMPACT Conference, Santander (2018)

Abstract

This article gives an account of a collaborative project exhibited at IMPACT 10 in Santander in 2018. It was initiated and carried out under the guidance of Professor Annu Vertanen by staff and students of the Printmaking Department at the Academy of Fine Arts (Uniarts) Helsinki. The article delves into the work’s famous source, namely English Renaissance poet and cleric John Donne’s prose poem Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions of 1624, in which the author reflects upon his sudden 23-days-long severe, life-threatening illness. Donne’s poem not only lent the artistic work its thematic focus, namely the precarity as well as the interdependence of life (vice the text’s most-quoted sentence: “No man is an island”). Its twenty-three parts, each sub-divided into three, also provided the literal and metaphorical structural frame of the installation’s main piece, complemented by an accompanying book object as well as a sound piece. It furthermore afforded a fitting avenue for the multi-participant collaboration by means of the allocation, via lottery, of each day to one participant who then responded to the theme/s raised. The article discusses several of these reactions in terms of their medial, aesthetic and conceptual approach, many of them employing diverse printmaking techniques to striking effect.

The multi-media installation as a whole is further examined as an instance of aligning Donne’s contemplations to a contemporary aesthetico-ethical agenda, both in terms of making as well as  teaching. Thus, the installation not only realises the role of the artist ‘as a witness to his or her cultural and social present’ (Rebentisch, 2015, p228), its impressive collaborative nature moreover becomes an active demonstration of art as a way of life that is ‘attentive to connectedness and togetherness’ (Riikka Stewen, 2018, 30).