Adele Hyry: Chicken-Legged Hunter Ladybug

Adele Hyry’s artist book ‘Chicken-Legged Hunter Ladybug – Kananjalkainen Metsästäjä Leppäkerttu’ is an experimentally and poetically reconstructed collection of documentary photographs, text and sketches. The intimate and ephemeral photographs have been culled with a norm-critical eye from Hyry’s personal archive from 2002-2021 and structured into thematic chapters.

Animal energy, gloominess and fun intertwine in photographs that are embodied messages from the nerves of time. In momentary and repetitive self-portraits and encounters with others, memories, stories and events are intermingled in streams of experience that test the boundaries of the real and the personal.

Images that defy preconceived definitions and conventions humorously confound binary and aesthetic norms. At the thematic core are the dark side of the mind, consciousness and representation, as well as the emotional dimensions of communality and bystanderhood.

The publication also includes an index of images and a text section, compiled from encounters conducted remotely during the book’s production process, in which the artist discusses their artistic process with curator Nimco Kulmiye Hussein, as well as the themes of the work and references to other authors and works. The publication is self-published with the support of the Arts Promotion Centre.

“Adele Hyry’s photographs play with the intimate aspect of one’s lifetime without pushing the visual expression to become relatable. Instead, the sharing of a reservoir, loaded with one’s memories, is centred. Within the eight divisions, the poetic is met with a level of complexity.

What could be seen at first as an auto-biography, becomes rather a polyphonic dialogue between multiple actors – the photographed (family, friends and lovers), the referenced (Francesca Woodman, Pipilotti Rist, Hiromix), and the photographer. The affective elements become unfeigned, non-chronological assemblages of yesterday, the present and the possibilities of tomorrow – an exploration of the ‘elsewheres’.” Nimco Kulmiye Hussein