Drawing as more-than-human

On Hanna Saarikoski’s video work C

Abstrakti

This article focuses on Hanna Saarikoski’s video artwork C and specifically on the handcrafted suit made of artists’ charcoal that Saarikoski wears in the video. The title of the artwork, C, can be seen as a reference to both artists’ charcoal and carbon, as in the carbon footprint of humans in the age of climate emergency. I discuss the video work C from the perspective of ecocritical art that aims to raise awareness of human impact on the environment, relating to much-criticized anthropocentrism (‘human centeredness’). To explore how C works as ecocritical art and how it can challenge anthropocentrism both in artmaking and in the context of climate emergency, I will engage with the production process of the handcrafted suit and then examine how the artist and the charcoal suit co-draw in the video work C. In this inquiry, I foreground the notion of process autonomy that highlights the complex involvement of multiple human and non-human forces and fragments in the production process of an artwork. This kind of complex setting is always somewhat unpredictable, and hence what the work of art cannot be completely controlled by the artist alone; instead, the work of art will gain its own momentum. I propose that, in C, the performing artist and the charcoal suit become a more-than-human drawing agency.