Fair Sculpture
Fair Sculpture encourages and helps empower children and young people, with a focus on young people who have fewer opportunities to engage with different kinds of art and culture.
About Fair Sculpture
Fair Sculpture is an inter-generational and multidisciplinary artistic community project consisting of two branches, in which participation is free for participants. One branch is a weekly afternoon school for children and young people in the facilities of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Theatre Academy in Helsinki (Sörnäinen Campus). The other is a residency branch, where artists are invited to hold an art residency in a school outside of Helsinki.
The latest residency was on 1 February – 30 May 2026 in Sotunki school in Vantaa.
Artist residency
In the Fair Sculpture artist residency, the resident artist works at a school, not as a teacher or other usual member of school staff, but as a professional artist. The project aims to empower kids and young people from different backgrounds. The focus is to give exposure to school children who do not normally have the opportunity to meet professional artists and encounter different kinds of cultural events as well as give the participating artists opportunities to work and create in a vivid learning environment.
Essi Pitkänen and Daniela Pascual Esparza worked at the residency of Joutsa during spring 2023. The artists Iiri Poteri and Thomas Westphal worked as artists-in-residence at two schools in Espoo for 2,5 months in Autumn 2024.
Weekly afternoon school
In 2024, the Fair Sculpture project is involved in a pilot of cultural education model for secondary schools in the city of Espoo. The aim is to strengthen creativity and learning. A group of young people from secondary and vocational schools in Espoo will participate in a weekly art afternoon at Mylly. Aura Kotkavirta is the responsible teacher of the group.
From January 2022 until May, kids from Eastern Helsinki from Kontula Art School (KAS!) joined the Fair Sculpture project. They worked on a weekly base at Uniarts Sörnäinen Campus facilities.
Funding
Both branches of Fair Sculpture are funded by the Talent Boost funds to run pilot-projects.
With the help of Talent Boost funding, Fair Sculpture was able to pay all teachers and other experts staff involved, metro tickets, materials and food and drinks. The project also got huge support by sculpture students, who for the weekly afternoon school gave space in the workshops so the kids and youngsters could work there.