Building Transparency: A Public Artwork for Oulu Police Station

Can I breathe now? My first public artwork is finally on the wall. The installation took place in that particularly Finnish kind of weather where the rain does not fall so much as attack horizontally. By the time the last piece was bolted into place, the work had travelled hundreds of kilometres and passed through the hands of an impressive number of people who somehow made an enormous engineering puzzle look effortless.

A work about seeing and being seen

I work in Suomenlinna, where an open prison operates close to my studio. Prisoners have participated in restoring the fortress walls, and I have had some fascinating conversations with them over the years. Those encounters made me think about visibility, responsibility, fairness and the possibility of building a path forward. Then I saw a call for an artwork for a police station and wanted to create something. 

Läpinäkyvyys, Transparency is about what we see, what remains hidden and how we choose to encounter oneanother. For me, glass is fundamentally a material of seeing. It reveals, but it can also distort, reflect and conceal. It is never quite as straightforward as it first appears. 

The form of the work comes from the idea of stones crossing a flowing stream. One stone alone will not get you very far. The path exists because the stones relate to one another. I think that is also a metaphor for society. We do not always get across alone. We need other people, cooperation and trust.

Then reality arrived

The first drawings were not the final work because the building itself had opinions. The artwork sits high on a brick wall, which meant the original scale was simply too small. Handmade glass also comes with its own physical and technical demands, particularly when you want it to survive outdoors for years. So the work grew and instead of making enormous single pieces, we developed larger compositions from several glass elements. This gave us a more reliable solution in terms of durability, maintenance and installation while also making the composition more interesting.

The glass was blown into sand moulds by master glassblower Kari Alakoski and Marja Hepo-aho, to create the irregular, stone-like surfaces. The sides are transparent glass, while the front surfaces are opal, allowing the fixing structures to disappear while giving the light something to work with. Making large pieces of handmade glass is not exactly a plug-and-play operation. It requires timing, physical strength, experience and a willingness to accept that the material may have its own ideas.

Arto Hyyryläinen developed the metal moulds used to shape the glass. They were almost sculptures in their own right. Then came the question nobody wants to ignore with a permanent public artwork: How exactly do you attach fragile glass to a brick wall and expect it to stay there for decades?

The invisible architecture

Ossi Törnberg from Metallikaari solved problems I had not yet realised were problems. He developed a new method for cutting angular fixing holes into the glass with a waterjet. This allowed the steel counter-pieces to fit precisely into the glass and prevented the pieces from gradually rotating over the years, something that could happen with round fixing points.

The mounting system also includes maintenance hatches and drainage holes. Installation templates were made to position everything down to the last millimetre. The engineering became far more sophisticated than anything in the original sketches. And this is one of the things I love about public art: technology is not the enemy of art. Sometimes engineering is part of the art itself.

The building also had its say. Different sections of the brick wall had different load-bearing capacities, and some recessed areas could not be used at all. The composition therefore evolved in response to the architecture rather than simply being imposed upon it.

Sami Lämpsä and Ossi even built a weather simulator for the prototypes, testing how the structures would withstand the conditions they were about to face, especially snow and ice.

Because apparently making a glass sculpture is not enough. You also need to imagine what February in Oulu is going to do to it. The metal structures were finally painted to match the brickwork, allowing the blue glass to take centre stage and keeping the whole composition visually calm.

The journey to the wall

The transportation was another small engineering masterpiece. The glass pieces were transported already mounted into their metal structures and bolted securely onto freight pallets. That made it possible to move the large works much more safely. Matias drove them from Kerava to Oulu and also installed the pieces. The fixings were chemically anchored into the wall, with every drill point carefully planned to avoid the more vulnerable areas of the brickwork. Every single drill hole had its own installation template made by Ossi, waterjet-cut from metal, individually numbered and made specifically for its exact position on the wall.

Then, finally, the pieces travelled upwards. Carefully lifted. Carefully aligned using installation templates. And then they clicked into place. Even the nuts were painted to match the wall. I love that detail. There is something wonderfully Finnish about spending an enormous amount of time solving an invisible technical problem and then making sure nobody notices the solution.

A sculpture made by many hands

By the time Läpinäkyvyys reached the wall, it was no longer something I could reasonably call "my work" without qualification. It is my artistic work, yes. But it exists because of a large network of knowledge, craftsmanship, engineering, transport, construction and problem-solving. This feels particularly important to me. The work is about a path made from stones. And the making of it became something like this; One person could not have built this path. It took glassblowers, metalworkers, engineers, installers, builders, transporters, architects, technicians and an unusually patient construction crew.

The SRV team worked with remarkable calm and precision while Oulu's sideways rain did everything it could to make the day memorable. Juho and Kimmo also tolerated a truly heroic amount of my Savonian humour. I recommend a pay rise.

After the final piece was installed, I sat on the trailer and looked up. For the first time, there was nothing left to solve. At least for that afternoon.

Läpinäkyvyys is now part of Oulu.

If you are in the city, go and look at it. Look at the glass from different angles. Notice what becomes visible, what disappears and how the light changes it.