Océane Bruel

Kesäuni (Summer Dream)
Duo show - Iisa Lepistö & Océane Bruel
at Orimattila Art Museum, 12.06-23.08.2026

Curated by Saskia Suominen
Produced in collaboration with the Finnish Sculptors’ Association

Documentation images : Inari Sandell

Press release (in Finnish)

Accompanied by a text by Anastasia (A) Alevtin

"One summer dream

In June, the spine of the world might be the sunroot stem negotiating gravity with the lucid glass edge of your summer dream—

when sweaty with the sultry weather, your skin languidly accepts a tickle of a grass blade, of a spruce needle, and a sand granule stuck to your lakely wet feet, marble-heavy with residues of free roaming after a quick, refreshing dip;

when succulent fruit flesh and acids smear your chin and stomach and set ablaze the corners of your soft, sun-kissed lips;

when you spit cherrypeachapricotplum pits seasonally filling up all the mouths, the pits of apricots that grow on the birch behind the scolding hot wooden house, and cherries—on the pines, and peaches—on the oaks. Why not? You know well enough that anything is possible (in the trickstery dusk of the long-awaited season); and dew-bowed dog roses are nodding, affirming it, hypnotising;

when unsure-footed, you are lulled to lie down, to marvel at the metamorphic rocks pleating, curving into a bouquet of flowers. Curious, you brush over them softly with your palms, confused with the June haze;

when the air hangs heavy with the exhilarating concoction of elderflowers, soft cat's ears, ragged robins, woodruffs, viper's buglosses, and yellow irises. Slipping through your pores, your nostrils, the concoction becomes another of your vital bodily fluids, filling up all cavities and fissures, nourishing and thrilling;

when everything is effortless and bubbles with the unhurried white noise;

when sweet uncharting, unclassifying irrational fog is omnipresent. A soothing shapeshifter, it is only tentatively saturated with your slow bodily movements, pleased, sobbing viscous obscurities, lush with opacities faulting your habits of geometry, distances are proximities, and identities are lost.

Suddenly.

Out of the lazy blue, the sharp wind slaps with a disquieting hush. Your attention awake, shifts. The purging Sun hits. It should have been resting, napping. Now showing up, showing off, it melts metals and your certainty:
your leery head aches, your chest chokes on a cherry pit. What is fog? Is the haze safe and a dream? Or a nightmare?
Sultry heat or sickly fever?
Skin sensuous or sore?
A new honeyed bodily fluid or a pervasive and liquid alien touch from within, drenching, ripping?
A mouthful of generous fruit flesh or rotten pits?
Have you swallowed or are you being eaten?
A flower offering or in memoriam?
Effortless or of somebody’s making?

Wistful, suspecting, you figure it would be best to fall asleep (again). Who can? Who does not? Sleepless non-heroic funambulists—berrypickers, mothers, cleaners, nurses, plants, plants, plants, grandmotherlings, farmers growing, meadow and storm deities tending, seeds forming, containing, remembering, woodpeckers, plymakers, herb whisperers, mermaids, fishers, migrants, migraine survivors, and others, or you—as close as strangers, all walking the sunroot stem, working longer, unembroidered summer hours, with spines made of marble, baking bread, growing roses, weathering under the blissful snoozles of bodies who rest, who can. In this invented summer, the world breaks apart; 1 everything is possible.

In June, the spine of the world might be the sunroot stem negotiating gravity with the lucid glass edge of your summer dream—sculpted confidently, lovingly by someone’s hands fluent in the delicate matter of dry radish pods, in wisdom of birch wood, not taking granite for granted2, alert to who labours, who searches, who finds, who leaves more than takes, who makes anything possible in (the trickstery dusk of time), who knows possibilities are demanding.3 "

1 With liberties, this phrase is borrowed from Sea and Fog (2012) by Etel Adnan.
2 Ursula Le Guin, “Being Taken for Granite” (2004).
3 From Sea and Fog (2012) by Etel Adnan.