Lover’s-ear | Milla Toukkari
Milla Toukkari (Helsinki, Finland)
May 2018. 4-part text on vellum, paper, vinyl on glass.
Lover’s-ear is a text series distributed through Downtown Greensboro and installed within the 3-floor museum that explores intimacy at a distance with the self, loved ones, and strange entities through distance and personal perspectives. Displayed at Elsewhere through bedroom love letters and window installations, Lover’s-ear asks audiences to bridge the notion of the unknown with ideas of memory, intimacy, and publicity.
Originally foreign, the naturalized Lamb’s-ear plant is common in numerous North American regions. Being based of Helsinki, Toukkari was immediately attracted to the herb when first encountering it in the museum’s garden by its strange and otherworldly sensuality.
The arbitrary nature of this starting point— the Lamb’s-ear plant not being part of the museum collection— functioned as an open platform for the artist to self-immerse into the collection and investigate the fine line between curated and censored memory, legitimate extraneousness and forbidden otherness, and recollected sensation and actual fantasy.
Production Support: Derek Toomes
Process
