Outsider Environments Europe: Irja Alinen, Näkyjen Puutarha / The Garden of Visions

this picture and the next three by Veli Granö, as on the

website of and in agreement with the

Association for rural culture and education (Finland)

Pori is a city of some 83.000 inhabitants (2023) in the south-west of Finland, located nearby the coast along the Gulf of Bothnia.

The city is part of the ten largest cities in Finland and surprisingly there is a sculpture garden in this city, which in terms of number of creations ranks among the largest art environments in Finland....

Life and works

This sculpture garden was created by Irja Alinen. She was born in 1944 and had an experience at the age of six that had a major impact on her life.

Irja had that experience when she saw an angel in a dream, who asked her to join her on the way to heaven. Irja indicated that she had to discuss this with her mother first.

The angel would come back the next day and indeed the next evening the shape appeared again. Irja indicated that her mother had said that she was still too young to go to heaven and then the angel turned heavenward in a beam of light.

This experience would have a major influence on Irja Alinen's further life. She realized that there could be life in a parallel environment and that in some way she could interact with personalities from that other world.

Creating a visionary garden with sculptures

For Irja Alinen creating an art environment started in the late 1990s, when she was in her mid-50s, By then, her three sons had already left home.

She lived on her own in a house with a large garden. A neighbor, who also lived on her own, had a pile of sand and cement after work in her house or garden, which she didn't know what to do with.

Irja thought of a pair of swans. In many cultures, swans have a specific symbolic meaning and, for example a sculpture of two swans looking at each other, can be a representation of loyalty and inseparability.

Irja did indeed make a sculpture with two swans and this was the beginning of the project of many years that would involve the creation of a few hundred concrete sculptures.

Her awareness of the existence of parallel worlds played a major role in the realization of the project.

The experience gained as a six-year-old was later in her life supplemented with similar experiences, such as it happened one evening when she turned off the light in her bedroom, that she saw an alien standing in the doorway.

When making sculptures, she noticed that she experienced a certain guidance, as if something external was telling her how and what to do. As she has said: If the guide is not there, there is absolutely no point in trying to work, the work will not go well....

Before making sculptures, the water in the concrete mix is blessed and ashes from burnt trees are added to connect with tree spirits.

In her creative activities, Irja Alinen is inspired by visions she gets and the people she sees.

This includes all kinds of people who are part of a parallel reality, as depicted in the image above and the three images below. This series of three consists of screenprints from the video in the documentation, made in 2018 by Veli Granö., in which Irja talks about her creations and the context in which she does her work.

By watching the video, which is subtitled in English, one can get a good insight into Irja Alinen's ideas.

Veli Granö is also the one who referred to Alinen's garden as Näkyjen Puutarha (Garden of Visions)

this picture and the two below left and right

are screenshots from the video in the documentation

Irja Alinen's sculpture garden as it currently is, does not only show people from another dimension, there are also numerous sculptures that depict characters from our everyday world.

For example, in the very first image there is not only a group of angels, but also a clergyman dressed in a habit on the right and a lady in a sitting position on the left. All those characters stand peacefully together.

The same applies to the people and animals depicted in a variety of other sculptures, such as mermaids, unicorns, dragons, Indians and well-known cartoon and fairytale characters, which all are arranged in harmony with each other.