Pia Sirén (b. 1982) is a site-specific sculptor who sources the materials for her spatial installations from garden centres and hardware stores.
She constructs immersive works using synthetic, commonplace items such as plastics, tarpaulins, scaffolding, aluminium ladders, insulation, buckets, hoses, boarding and zip ties, which she transforms into ephemeral, illusory landscapes evoking the arbitrary features of nature.
Photo: Kati Rapia
Pia Sirén: Under Cover, 2025. Helsinki Biennial 8.6.–21.9.2025, Vallisaari Island. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Maija Toivanen
Under Cover, 2025
Artwork location: Vallisaari Island
Her site-specific installation Under Cover serves as a gateway between the urban scenery of downtown Helsinki and the natural landscapes of Vallisaari Island. When visitors arrive by ferry, the first thing they encounter is not nature, but a fictional landscape proposed by the artist. Sirén’s installation is inspired by her interest in the problem of human estrangement from nature; her art reflects the way people in contemporary society rarely come into contact with unspoiled wilderness – what we confront instead is an altered version of nature modified by human hands. Through her use of synthetic materials, Sirén foregrounds the artificiality of human-modified nature, while also questioning the unrelenting human impulse to control the natural world.
In Under Cover, the buildings on the ferry wharf are camouflaged behind an artificial landscape of blue sky, faraway hills, forests and trees. Sirén’s gesture of disguising the built structures is a symbolic attempt to erase human imprints from the landscape.
Sirén’s installation is literally an anthropocentric construct (from the Latin construere) – an artificial model of a postcard-like snapshot of island scenery. It also comments on the cultural constructs that define our ideas about nature, landscape imagery and identity. It is ultimately also about perception and the way interpretation is always altered by perspective. A landscape is a visual and mental construct of land, sea, forest, hills and air – it is an amalgam of real natural formations, fiction, and imagined and remembered notions of what constitutes a landscape.