Wasteland, 2015

Wasteland, 2015

Ulla Jokisalo
Finland, b. 1955
From the series Collection of Headless Women, 2013–18
Ink-jet print and pins
© Ulla Jokisalo, digital image courtesy of the artist

Ulla Jokisalo uses found photographs—from popular magazines, vintage family albums, and other sources—as the points of departure for her carefully handcrafted assemblages. She then sews, manipulates, and otherwise fashions dimensional compositions that unite her personal memories and associations with a surreal world of fairy tale figures and gender-redefined creatures. The title of this work is a reference to T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem “The Waste Land” (1922), in which a large cast of narrators continually upends our sense of reality.