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Kuvasto

Leftovers

nabbteeri

Stadin ammatti- ja aikuisopiston Prinsessantien toimipiste, Prinsessantie 3, 00820 Helsinki

Indoor Sculpture

Leftovers by nabbteeri (Janne Nabb, b. 1984 and Maria Teeri, b. 1985) consists of hundreds of miniature sculptures made of sugar paste and piled up like trash in display boxes.

The miniature sculptures are based on trash that the artists collected from seashores, city streets, waste lands and forests between 2014 and 2017. For nabbteeri they are evidence of our time. The artists have recreated the trash in sugar with great attention to detail and size. Some of the sculptures are faithful renditions of the original, while others have gone off on a more imaginative tangent.

The medium of the piece, sugar, references the site of the work, Helsinki Vocational College, which provides training in the food and restaurant industry. Many students in the school come into contact with sugar in all its forms. Trash, on the other hand, is something we all are familiar with, having both dropped and collected them.

The artists say: “People drop candy wrappers, cigarette butts, buttons, chewing gum, receipts, tickets, bottle caps, coffee cup lids, parts of plastic devices. We find them out there in the world along the routes we take, bring them back and recreate them in sugar paste, dry them and put them under glass. In their new incarnation, they look like scraps of paint, jewels, origami sculptures, something that has escaped from a painting or a collage. Plastic in its countless variations, slippery time-repelling creatures immutable on the human time scale, are here turned into figures made of sugar, unable to withstand the smallest of floods without changing shape. From a dyed mixture of sugar and glycerol emerge sophisticated portraits of excess – oral monuments to the age of oil. The history of sugar is long and dark, not unlike that of the enabler of our leftover materials, oil. Using an edible medium to depict trash that consists mostly of plastic creates an association with the indestructibility of plastic: how today tiny granules of plastic or dissolved plastic compounds are a permanent part of our own food chain, whether we like it or not.”

The piles of sugar paste sculptures are placed on show in four display cases located in the lobby of the third-floor library of the college. The taping on the library windows library pick up the theme of the sculptures.

The work was produced under the Percent for Art programme, and it belongs to the collection of the City of Helsinki, managed by HAM Helsinki Art Museum.

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