SCULPTURE PARK

The sculpture park, unfolding across the historic Nissbacka Manor estate, is the beating heart of the museum.

Laila Pullinen sought to protect the culturally and historically significant manor grounds — its venerable trees and traditional outbuildings. She safeguarded the area by placing her own sculptural works in dialogue with its natural and historical environment. This act of artistic activism laid the foundation for the museum’s core mission.

The sculpture park forms the essence of the holistic artistic vision Pullinen created at Nissbacka. She referred to it as a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art in which her sculptures are organically interwoven with the old manor landscape. It is a living entity where history converses with the present, continually evolving. The park maintains the environmental processes initiated by Pullinen: trees nearing the end of their life cycle are left to decay naturally in the surrounding wooded areas, providing habitat and nourishment for small creatures. Whenever possible, old structures and natural features are preserved and restored rather than replaced — after all, the very purpose of the sculpture park is to protect the area from the construction of new buildings.

Pullinen’s sculptural practice is grounded in classical processes and materials. She worked primarily with bronze and various types of stone — including marble and lesser-known Finnish granites. At the heart of her art lies the powerful formal language of Informalism and a distinct desire to make the invisible visible. In the rougher, draped surfaces of her bronzes, one can discern echoes of ancient ideals and classical sculpture, while the polished sections rise passionately above the rest, like spirit or immaterial strength emerging from matter.

A Site-Specific Sensory Experience

The sculpture park is an experience shaped by sensory elements that recur year after year: the breath of sea wind on the skin, the rustling of ancient trees, birdsong filling the air, and the scents of changing seasons. All of this is bound together by the tranquillity that has been carefully nurtured at Nissbacka for more than forty years. Pausing allows the layered history of the park to unfold for the observer. Century-old buildings appear young beside the 250-year-old oaks, and even they have witnessed only part of Nissbacka’s 500-year story. Pullinen’s earth relief “Muinainen meri” (Ancient Sea, 1987) on the southern slope reminds visitors of the earliest human presence in the area: the valley opening toward Sotunki once formed the shoreline of the post-Ice Age Yoldia Sea, a former seabed revealed around 10,000 years ago.

Arcs from Environment to Art — Nissbacka as a State of Mind

Pullinen’s sculptures are placed and carved to engage in dialogue with their surroundings. They form their own layer in the continuum of the landscape. In the sculpture park, the works emerge naturally in the sunlight, their appearance shifting with the seasons and time of day. The natural colours of the stone reveal themselves differently outdoors than in an indoor setting, while polished bronze gleams like a mirror to the sun.

Perhaps the most poetic connection between Nissbacka and Pullinen’s art is found in the birds: the same birds that sing in the manor’s treetops alight on her bronzes in the late 1980s. Pullinen would walk through the park on early summer mornings, admiring the birds’ flight exercises and the concerts rising from the old treetops — memories that linked her to her childhood in Terijoki and to her years in Rome. In this sense, Nissbacka is not only a place, but a state of mind.