Timo Hannunen’s road to becoming a sculptor has taken several turns. He first qualified as an artisan carpenter in Petäjävesi in the late 1980s. In the beginning of the following decade, he studied at Liminka and Kankaanpää Art Schools. In Kankaapää, he gave up experimenting with printmaking and painting and turned to sculpture, adopting stone, particularly granite, as his main material. In 1994, Hannunen made a six-week-long study visit to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, which he regards as highly significant for the development of his artistic career. At the Institute of Art there, he worked out his individual identity as an artist, and his artistic expression became sparer.

Timo Hannunen is known for his production of large funerary monuments, which he has made of important artists like the actor Veikko Sinisalo (2005), the singer and song-writer Juice Leskinen (2007) and the film director Matti Kassila (2024). The subjects of his works are also generally on a large scale. The hard material of stone itself and the slow process of working it create associations connected with time, space and the state of nature expressed through art. He explains: My sculptures are most often various degrees of fusions of an observation of the environment, my own particular state of mind at the time and the way I think. A third element in my works is the concept of time, which is so intimately connected with stone. Concern for the present state of nature and frustration – sorrow indeed – over things that we have lost are also traceable in some of my most recent works.

Although Timo Hannunen prefers not to explain his works in order to preserve their ambiguous nature, he has suggested to the viewer indications for interpreting them through the titles he has given them. There are four of Timo Hannunen’s works on show in the Layers exhibition: Milky Way (2023) and Probes (Fragments from Space, 2024) are made of granite, and The Only One (2023) and The Wind Turns of black granite (2025).

Artwork: Timo Hannunen, The Wind Turns, 2025

Photo of artwork: Vesa Aaltonen
Photo of artist: Anita Hannunen