Sini Villi

Finnish textile artist Sini Villi (b. 1980, Nivala) lives and works in Helsinki. She graduated with a Bachelor of Culture and Arts in 2004, focusing on clothing design, and worked for twenty years in fashion and interior textiles before turning to art — drawn, she says, by a need to slow down and go deeper into the process. She has exhibited across Europe — including Helsinki, Tallinn, Amsterdam, Brussels and Stockholm — and with The Lane at international art fairs including New York, Battersea, Berlin and Amsterdam. Her work is held in the Finnish State Art Collection, the Oulu Museum of Art Collection and the Delen Private Bank art collection in Belgium, as well as in private collections worldwide.

Villi works with handmade natural ribbon, which she layers, sews and shapes into three-dimensional wall sculptures. Hardened from within, each piece keeps the form it was given — a surface that looks quiet and one-toned from a distance and shifts into movement as you come closer.

The work comes out of the landscape of Northern Ostrobothnia, where she grew up: wide, silent fields ploughed into soft rhythmic grooves each autumn; the pared-back, single-tone palette of winter; the return of colour in spring. Those repetitions are her vocabulary — laid down layer upon layer, coil upon coil, in a slow, patient rhythm.

"I am inspired by the endless layers and spiral patterns of nature," she says. "These softly repetitive shapes have been an essential part of my art since the beginning." For Villi the making is itself part of the subject: change, unfolding, and the way life keeps flowing on.