Two artists, Glen Coutts and Antti Stöckell, from the ASAD network, show their artworks in an art exhibition in Oulu, Finland. Glen Coutts has worked as a Professor of Applied Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lapland, where Antti Stöckell is a university lecturer in applied visual arts. The exhibition is shown in the Café Antell Piha and the adjacent Takapiha.
The artworks in the exhibition highlight the intertwining of human presence, action and stories in the Northern landscapes of Finland and Scotland.
Snow and winter have gradually become a central area of my artistic practice. Playing With Snow series, which I started in 2009, grows with new works every winter. A significant part of the work is moving around the terrain by skiing and feeling the current winter conditions and the opportunities offered by the day’s weather to work. In this way, I experience a connection to the ecocultural activities of past generations through the skill of utilizing the weather. Snow play is often a spontaneous, playful activity with shapes, rhythm and light. Alongside and through playfulness, I also encounter losses and grief related to forests and the threat of winter disappearing. Art can be a significant thread of ecocultural identity, strengthening hopeful prospects for the future. – Antti Stöckell
Intra-actions are related to encounters and situations in which, for example, tools, materials and conditions that change throughout the year are thought to have agency, just as we humans do. We and our landscape are shaped together through the interaction of different agencies.
These works form an ongoing series of limited-edition digital pigment prints examining how northern landscapes are shaped through resource use, labour, and lived experience. Grounded in the Firth of Clyde on Scotland’s west coast, they position Scotland as a northern place, sharing ecocultural conditions with other North Atlantic and near-Arctic regions. Combining drawing, photography, and mixed-media processes, the prints reference tools, trades, and material practices that sustain local livelihoods and identities. They also attend to less visible infrastructures, including Cold War legacies, introducing latent tension. Through an ecocultural lens, the series traces entangled relationships between land, sea, and community across shifting environmental and temporal conditions. – Glen Coutts
A series of monthly rotating exhibitions presents the artistic processes and works of artists, art educators, and designers from the ASAD network. The exhibitions explore northern and Arctic phenomena from an ecocultural perspective, where natural ecosystems, cultural practices, and ways of living are intertwined across time and place. The exhibitions are shaped through the ASAD network’s cross-border international collaboration, in which art, research, and pedagogical practices intersect, sharing understandings of northern ways of being and possible futures.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Emeritus Timo Jokela from the University of Lapland, who has previously served as Professor of Art Education, UArctic Chair in Arctic Art and Design, and leader of the ASAD network.
Exhibition venue:
Café Antell Piha and the adjacent Takapiha meeting space
Kauppurienkatu 7, Oulu
Further information:
Timo Jokela, timo.jokela@ulapland.fi
Antti Stöckell, Playing with Snow, 2023
Antti Stöckell, Playing with Snow, 2025
Glen Coutts, Old Rule. Original Digital Print. 2023.
Glen Coutts, Levelling With You, Original Digital Print. 2023.
Glen Coutts, Rough Round the Edges. Original Digital Print. 2023