Voice Artist Anna Saksman
Growing up in the midst of the rootiness and communality of a small town in Northern Ostrobothnia has been a grounding building material. The fact that there was room for creativity, artistry and spirituality in my childhood family has had a significant impact on my growth as an artist.
My background is as a director of theatrical expression, but voice has always been more or less a part of my work. When I graduated in 2005 as a director of theatrical expression at the Turku UAS Art Academy, my artistic thesis: ”Kurkisauna – sound meditation on finding one’s own voice” was a work based on voice and sound. Voice is also involved in my daily work as an audiobook reader, which I have been doing for over 10 years. Since 2018, I have been creating my own voice working method to help people find their own voices. Today, I am deeply inspired to create audio performance art.
As an artist, I am interested in the mystical nature connection and the sacred. Connecting with earth and wild as well as with the eternal and sacred are the source of my inspiration.
For me, voice is a holistic bodily experience alongside the auditory experience so working with sound is very body-based for me. It helps to sense, feel, experience myself, enlivening the experience of presence. I am interested in a living presence.
For me, voice is also a channel for expressing the invisible, and as an artist, my job is to settle down and listen. I listen and sense the invisible; nature, wild, sacred; that which springs from the source beyond the words. I give my voice, I transform my being into an instrument, a channel for what wants to be expressed.
I feel grateful for the recognition my work has received over the years. In April 2022, I was awarded as the best audiobook reader of the year in the fiction category with the book Väylä. I feel meaningfulness when I get to tune into the soul world of the work and give my presence and voice to the interpretation of the text. You can listen to audio samples of the works I have read here and the books I have read are fully listenable at bookbeat and storytel servers. My thesis ”Kurkisauna” was said in Turun Sanomat that it is ”… definitely one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of the year”. Over the years of working as a theater director at Theater Reipas Irma, the play I wrote and directed there was awarded at the Seinäjoki Amateur Theater Festival and was also chosen as Finland’s representative at the International Amateur Theater Festival in Tromsö.
In the future, I want to create more and more performance artworks that uplift, bring together, awaken the heart and wild nature connection. My dream is to create sound works in sacred, powerful nature places around Finland and abroad with inspiring collaborators and artists.
Contact information:
www.annasaksman.fi (opens in 1.12.2022)
+358 415023 3326
anna.saksman@gmail.com
Get aquinted with ”AuRORA”joint exhibition´s visual artists Eeva Kouvalainen, Timo Huttu , Ann-Mari Kamppuri and Johanna Kangasharju.