Stina Puotinen
Nouveau Riche
Stina Puotinen’s work occupies a space where objects transcend their material origins, transforming into conduits for memory, cultural resonance, and conceptual exploration. Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand” theory explores how we fundamentally experience objects in our everyday world. Puotinen's art practice reveals ways in which objects function as extensions of human intention yet simultaneously elude complete understanding. Through sculpture, installation, and performance, Puotinen disrupts the presumed stability of material forms, engaging the viewer in a dialogue where utility, history, and identity intertwine and unravel. These objects are no longer just "ready-to-hand"; they become a complex carrier of identity, trauma, and collective experience.
This interview is an exploration of Stina Puotinen’s artistic practice, positioning her work within critical conversations about material culture, objecthood, and the fluidity of meaning. Framed by her exhibition Nouveau Riche at Visit in Newburgh, NY, this discussion underscores the role of intimate, artist-run spaces in presenting nuanced and experimental practices. By examining Puotinen’s philosophical and historical engagements, the conversation situates her work within contemporary art’s broader discourse, shedding light on the intersection of cultural narratives, material aspiration, and identity.
TUSSLE: Objects in your practice seem to be living archives, accumulating layers of meaning like geological strata. How do you excavate and expose these embedded temporal narratives, and how is an object's historical resonance more significant than its original materiality?
Stina Puotinen: I often think about how we understand or really “classify” things as humans – objects, other humans, is not only most immediately through the differences but also due to context. Our visual literacy is shaped by physical and conceptual context. I spend much of my work day in an art studio with children ages 3 to 5, so I am witness to foundational learning, and I find it seeping into my thinking when I’m in my own studio. As children, we approach things fully concrete, materially - what is it made of, how big, how heavy, what does it feel like, etc.
As we age, this need to understand the “why” adds layers of symbolic, abstract meaning to nearly everything we see, touch, and say. All language is coded and symbolic. In that way, I find myself approaching objects with the historical and cultural context layers before I even get back to the material. Perhaps the influence of advertising, logos, etc.? Or the constant rapid flow of images we are all flooded with?
There is a conceptual thread idiosyncratic to me, which is how I build the image narrative for myself, but the connections made by various viewers, I hope, are in multiples, if not multitudes, beyond what I would even imagine. It’s like a visual game of telephone, any art viewing - will the viewer ever truly understand the intention of the maker purely through visual information? If people get at least a feeling of any kind when viewing my work - positive or negative - then either way, that’s a success for me.
We are only really able to see objects through our own personal specific lens - shaped by culture, experience, exposure to other cultures and ideas through education, travel, or both. I am fascinated by how objects are understood as symbols simultaneously innate human level as well as one's own particular mix of references, like a fingerprint. That’s why, as a museum educator by trade and training, I am genuinely interested in group conversations around artwork that happen conversationally, as I feel that can be such a unique experience right now. How often do you get to discuss artwork in a group of 20+ random adult strangers? Those conversations are infinitely fascinating to me. I learn so much from others, and I tend to lean towards empath.
TUSSLE: Martin Heidegger describes objects as “ready-to-hand,” inherently tied to their use. How do you think objects transcend their utility, and is their original function still a part of the narrative of your work?
Stina Puotinen: It’s funny; now that I’m really thinking about it, I think I am actually interested as often in the useless object as I am in the object that has an extremely specific function. In grad school, I did some nostalgia research into the Skymall catalogue and made some of those digital images back into physical slides for a slide projector. And Skymall! All those hyper-specific usage objects that are so specific are borderline useless. Incredible! Whole factories exist to create these things that are effectively immediately junk the moment they are given as a Secret Santa gift. And purely decorative objects - from modern design down to the tchotchke, I’m here for it all. The objects I use in my recent work are often now so removed from their object-hood - photographed back into 2D and then reprinted back into an object, as a box, or a flag, etc.
TUSSLE: Your chromatic strategies resonate with Albers' phenomenological investigations, which suggest that color is not merely visual but also a linguistic cipher. How do you choreograph this chromatic translation, where pigment becomes a kind of nomadic signifier capable of destabilizing an object's presumed ontological integrity?
Stina Puotinen: I’m obsessed with coded visual languages, and my Art History roots peek through in my work fairly regularly. I can’t help but obsess about the specificity of meanings behind color and objects in, well - all art, especially truly specific and often forgotten historical references. Cultural phenomena, too, like Victorian meanings behind the way a woman would use her fan or the choice of flowers in a bouquet that had secret messages. Or the symbols train hoppers would chalk on fences and barns to alert the next person. Amish barn symbols, we used to drive past them visiting family in PA. So many examples here. A coded language decipherable only to the initiated, embedded in something so every day that not everyone is initiated to interpret. A recent collage series pulled symbology from “dead punctuation marks” - punctuation we no longer use or never caught on, that was intended to indicate feeling or intention in the written word.
With color - though there is, of course, latent symbolic meaning in color - I tend to work more intuitively, with less specific symbolic / coded intention. I think color chords outweigh visual over more interpretive content.
TUSSLE: Your subtle use of humor appears less as comic relief and more as a sophisticated hermeneutic tool. How does playful subversion operate in your practice as a method of destabilizing fixed meanings and revealing the profound absurdities embedded in material culture?
Stina Puotinen: I think people - especially adults - consider play to be frivolous or invaluable (because capitalism) but to reconnect with play and levity, wow, how freeing - especially now when its getting harder to do so. I mean a seriously important quality is to be able to laugh at yourself (as much if not more than others) and Art is serious but also takes itself a little too seriously at points, in my opinion. Inverting expectations, even on a small scale, is good practice for big / bigger change elsewhere.
Playing with expectations and meaning through verbal and visual entendre as well as material is definitely a throughline in my work. Especially in recent work, a big part of what I’m investigating are expectations around the value of materials and methods of making. What makes one material more “valuable” than another in the artmaking context? With my recent series of shaped marble collages I am pulling visual references from marble inlay traditions that are typically seen in a religious or palatial context all over Europe and elsewhere. But I’m using materials that are easily accessible and low price point - not just out of financial necessity but conceptually to mimic a process that is seen and understood visually as “high class” or luxury.
This class aspiration that is embedded in material is really fascinating to me as an emblem of the way those of us who can’t afford the real thing play at approximating luxury goods by using the visual signifiers of that material or object but crafted from a substitute and more ubiquitous materials. This is something we have done throughout history — I’m thinking of early colonists (badly) faux finishing wood with paint to approximate “higher quality” wood.
This really all came from moments I kept encountering on a trip to Rome in 2023 where I would see these gorgeous full marble inlay works everywhere and then the hidden (wooden) door would be faux marble painted but sort of badly and obviously. Like they spent so much time making these beautiful marble works and now more modern hands are badly painting an ATM to match so it “blends in”
Stina Puotinen and Marcel Duchamp share a similar perspective on the reimagining of objects, yet their approaches diverge in critical ways. Where Duchamp's readymades were often stark, provocative gestures that violently wrenched everyday objects from their utilitarian contexts—rendering them absurd and intellectually confrontational—Puotinen's practice operates as a more nuanced archaeological investigation. Her work does not just displace objects but lovingly excavates their hidden narratives, transforming them through humor, color, and performative translation. Duchamp demanded that viewers intellectually recognize the arbitrariness of an object's meaning; Puotinen invites viewers into a more intimate dialogue, where objects are not just conceptual provocations but living archives of memory, intention, and potential. While both artists fundamentally challenge the fixed nature of materiality, Puotinen's approach is less about negation and more about revealing—her objects are not stripped of meaning but rather charged with multiple, layered significance. She transforms the Duchampian strategy of disruption into a generative process of purpose, where an object's history is not destroyed but dynamically reinterpreted, creating a more empathetic and complex engagement with materiality.
TUSSLE: Your work resonates with Duchamp's readymades—both challenge the fixed meanings of objects. Duchamp often used confrontation, where your approach seems more generative and nuanced. How do you see your method of object transformation as a dialogue with or departure from Duchamp's strategy of disrupting an object's inherent utility?
Stina Puotinen: I mean, wow, even having us in the same sentence is an honor! I suppose the conversation I’m attempting to have with Duchamp is really through the latent humor in encountering quotidian materials in an Art space/ context. Both the initiated and uninitiated art viewers are able to pick up on that reversal of expectations on what is accepted or typically seen in a gallery space. A ready-made art in its full form is truly an art to do well, especially in our modern context, but my interest in inverting material expectations is a bit of a nod to that.
Both involve ideas around value, which connects back to the humor piece of this, really. Duchamp, in my opinion, is perhaps the original art prankster archetype of modern and contemporary art, and so much of art history since then has been shaped by his influence. His questioning of what “can” be art or what is “allowed” to be art is in a direct throughline to so many other artists, Cattelan of course, but also Irwin Wurm and Robert Gober, Rachel Harrison, Amanda Ross Ho, and on and on…
Even my still-life series from 2017 plays with that—using modern materials as substitutes for where we are trained over time to expect antiquity objects in a still-life trope. That work also has threads of the gross and grotesque and references 1970s cooking.
Images by Mollie McKinley, courtesy of Visit, Newburgh, NY.