NFT Showroom Artist Spotlight: @insaneworks

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’ve always had an open mind to anything the world has to offer. There are so many things that interest me, especially everything that has anything to do with art, but as I also think that almost everything is art or at least the creation process is, that thought doesn’t exclude things that much.

I live in Finland and was born in a small town. At a very early age, my family moved to the country, near an even smaller town, in the middle of the forest, beside a huge rock. That rock and the surrounding nature mostly defined me, who I was and who I thought I wanted to be for several years as I at the same time loved being in the middle of nature, I loved trees, plants, and flowers, but hated being there as for a young teenager, being at least 10 to 20 kilometers away from everything where I wanted to be, was awful.

I’ve always had a vivid imagination and the surroundings gave me an excellent chance to build things. Structures and imaginative worlds. My father was the one who always was happy to stop his important tasks, usually repairing our house, and come to aid me with my plans. And I’m still wondering how did I survive my childhood as the things that I usually asked involved doing things on the huge rock or building things on it.
“Dad, what’s the longest rope you have, can I have it?”
“Sure, why do you need it?”
“Just… I’m going to climb, only a little.”
And the rock, it had a cliff, a 10 to 20 meter vertical drop and that’s where I always wanted to be.

Q: What is your art background?

Dancing and drawing were the first things I remember doing as a child. In my younger years, I never was that patient so drawing was something I never seemed to have time to learn properly. There was always something more interesting to do. Like dancing. And that is the one thing that has been with me from childhood to this day. From traditional ballet classes to hip hop and street dances. Oriental to contact improvisation. Dancing, learning by muscle memory, has always been the thing where I, although might be physically tired, will never be mentally tired, bored, or impatiently stop if something seems too hard. And that, mostly, lead me to one of my professions, Dance Animateuring.

The third interest involving art I remember doing at a very early age is photographing. I got my father's semi-automatic film camera when I was a teenager and fell in love with the feeling of putting a camera between me and the world. Although I love the company of other people, I've always been really awkward around people. The camera allows me to go near people without feeling too uncomfortable. It shifts the focus away from me. The same thing how couple dancing and contact improvisation makes me feel. I alone am not the thing to concentrate on, the thing we do, is.

But as I never was that patient, the time from taking a photo and getting the developed results to my hands, was too slow for me. So photography stayed as an on-off hobby for me. Until the digital age. Nowadays, taking a photo and seeing the result immediately leads to several hours of photosessions in order to get just the right light and background to that tiny flower. I simply love macro photography! And flowers.

Not getting results in photographing quickly enough led me to study videography. I have training in audiovisual arts specializing in video production. I’ve worked in audiovisual and photography companies involving editing, filming, photographing, and post-production. At one point I also established my own company that has been a lifesaver when I’ve been between jobs or wanted to do art without strict rules defined by my employer.

Being an independent entrepreneur brought of course new challenges. I had to learn to code websites, graphic design, photoshop, layouts, and print media. But although I do love it, making videos, especially music videos, working with people, collaborations, I still had that one passion over others. Dancing.

Dance pedagogy education and Dance Animateuring gave me the ability to use dancing as a form to help people and work with them, as the methods of Dance Animateuring can be used as a bonding method but it can also be a therapeutic process, or the methods can be used to make a dance choreography or an entire show. And it never is just dancing. It’s combining other art methods and perhaps just daily routines.

That is what interests me most. Combining. I draw, paint, photograph and take video, add newspaper clippings, reassemble old parts and digitize it. Everything I do is never too sacred to be redone, reanimated in another way. Photos shredded and cloned, dance choreography drawn, an old ad made a collage, a painting reappearing in a video. Everything I do can someday evolve into something else. Nothing is never finished although it may be dormant in its current state. Thank goodness for image editing programs so I don’t literally have to destroy my old art anymore. Unless that’s the point.

I still usually want to keep the camera pointed away from me so the things I’ve published is mostly the side of me that I see when I inspect the world around me, not what I am. But of course, these two are hard to keep apart so even though I don’t photograph myself, the art that I do is always also a self-reflection. You cannot take the artist out of the art and vice versa.

Q: How long have you been in cryptoart/ NFTs, how did you discover them and what has been your experience so far?

I’ve been in cryptoart about a year now. For now, only in NFT Showroom and I found it because of Hive. I have been checking out other possibilities too but for now, this is enough for me.

I simply love the fact that artists have an easy way to make their art visible for people around the world. I love how many exceptional artists I’ve found, I love the mixture of different art forms, different media and all the different worlds and point of views. And it constantly surprises me how inventive people can be. With their art and the ways to use any digital platform.

Q: Any new art or upcoming projects you would like to tease?

I currently have two projects in NFT Showroom that are still in the making.

Affordable art is one of my latest projects. My plan is to make several pieces that all have the same theme. Watercolor, colored pencil, simple vector art, low price and over 10 but under 20 editions. And it is also a study of space. Empty and filled space. Space with or without lines. The first two are Navigating Home and Kitty Liftoff and both are already published in NFT Showroom. I really like the contrast of the creatures made with watercolors and the white space with the thin, simple, black lines.

The other work in progress is my black and white stripe collection that also already has few published pieces in NFT Showroom. Three of them actually. Striper, Stripehair, and Hatlady.

I love setting rules for myself and this one has two (oops, three… no, four!) rules. Has to be black and white (gray allowed), stripes and the next piece has to have elements from the previous work(s) in it. Also, I wanted to make a short story which I originally did not have as a rule, but that’s what I now, after two pieces, according to my rules have to do too.

The Striped series is drawn digitally, the third piece is partly copypasted from the second and the second is partly copypasted from the first. It’s all about the thing that I love to do, taking interesting forms and figures from previous works, twisting, cropping, and multiplying it so that the original artwork becomes something else. Something new. The Striped is all about copying and morphing.