The crystallised ephemerality of being: “The Geometry of Perception” by Helen Tago

Helen Tago is one of the most remarkable authors to emerge from the generation of graphic artists who entered the Estonian art scene in the 2000s. Her works focus on the technological and material aspects of printmaking, connecting ethics and aesthetics. One noteworthy technique she uses is electroetching, which not only leaves a smaller ecological footprint than the traditional method of using acid to etch into metal, but also allows her works to live on through recycling. Her works often transcend the two-dimensionality otherwise characteristic of graphic art by forming reliefs and structures that penetrate outwards from the walls in the exhibition hall, sometimes thrusting dynamically into the space. In addition to spatial manipulation, Tago has experimented with synthesising other artistic media. For instance, she has incorporated materials and techniques from glass art into her works in partnership with Tiina Sarapuu. Behind the exploration of materials in Tago’s works is her conceptual and philosophical approach to graphic art: its ability to speak to the audience in the context of modern art, and its potential to give meaning to the world.

The philosophical reflections in Tago’s works took time to mature and to find the right starting points and means of expression. As such, her solo exhibition at Tütar gallery serves as an important intermediate conclusion of her creative pursuits by presenting a comprehensive and original narrative on the base of her graphic series. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s contemplations on the possibilities and limitations in perceiving the world through the visible, the invisible and existence itself. “Formations” (2016), her series of small-format works in monotype technique, vividly demonstrates how our eyes transform arbitrary stains into clouds, instinctively seeking to link the abstract to something more tangible. This cloud motif carries over into the series “The Geometry of Perception. Revelation” (2025), which prompts the audience to see the body of work as a bank of clouds when viewed from one side, but as Platonic solids when viewed from the other.

The series is based on Tago’s creative dialogue with Urmas Ploomipuu’s “Landscape with a Prism” (1974) at Rüki gallery’s homage exhibition “The Geometric Realism of Urmas Ploomipuu: Encounters and Reflections” (2024). For Tago, the coupling of organic and geometric matter in Ploomipuu’s work lent it an estranged, even metaphysical quality. Platonic solids are a type of polyhedron which are unique for all their faces being regular and identical polygons, with the same number of faces meeting at each of their vertices. It is supposed that Plato considered these to be the base components of matter, but Johannes Kepler later used them to explain the laws of the galaxy within his model of the solar system, claiming that Platonic solids embodied the universal order and the highest “crystallised” concept of thought in both the micro- and macro-cosmic spheres.

By combining perspectives of clouds and Platonic solids in every work of “The Geometry of Perception”, Helen Tago makes it easier for the audience to grasp the paradoxical impossibility of capturing the mechanisms of being, which she brings closer to the viewer through her vibrating, shapeshifting works. In her series “Fields of Becoming” (2025), Tago approaches Platonic solids not as indivisible elementary particles, but as objects that can be dissected, diving ever deeper towards the core meaning of reality. This series presents vision of special aggregates: engines that activate our world. A further fascinating layer is provided to the exhibition via an installation entitled “Perception” (2025), which is the perforated metal screen that served as the printing matrix in other works by the artist. The screen functions as a filter through which one can observe both the works in the exhibition space and everyday life outside its windows. Similarly to the series “The Geometry of Perception. Revelation”, this work is a process of formation which comes true thanks to the viewer’s readiness to answer the artist’s call to think about the crystallised ephemerality of being.

Accompanying text: Elnara Taidre
Graphic design: Ott Metusala
Installation support: Erkki Kadarik

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.