Plot Twist: Senses Lyyti
At first glance, this is street art. Spray-painted stencils, drips left on purpose, fine white spatter thrown across saturated colour, the kind of surface you'd expect to find on a wall, not underneath you.
Look again. What's actually holding that paint is a stool built to the exact shape and proportions of one that stood in a Finnish barn for nearly a hundred years, unused, until a grandson found it in the attic and decided it deserved a second life.
That's the twist Senses Lyyti is built on: the newest-looking object in the room is the oldest.
The Reveal
Every morning, Laila Kekkonen sat on a plain wooden stool to milk her family's cows. Her husband had built it for her. She used it daily for decades, until the farm's working life ended and the stool went into the attic and stayed there.
Around 2010, her grandson Jari Karppinen found it. He didn't restore it. He rebuilt it, true to the original in shape and proportion, in Finnish pine. What could have stopped at nostalgia turned into something else entirely once it met Steit's ongoing art project, Senses, and a farmers tool became six works of graffiti art and one larger seventh, without ever changing the shape.
Six Senses, One That Isn't
Each of the six standard-size stools carries a paired set of words tied to a sense, stenciled and layered across the surface: Hear&Listen, Look&See, Smell&Scent, Taste&Savour, Touch&Feel.
Here's the second twist. A sixth stool, Learn&Know, doesn't belong to any sense organ at all. It's the outlier on purpose, the one that processes the other five senses into how we experience them. Just when the pattern looks locked, one piece breaks it.
Water, Told Through Air
The largest piece steps outside the set entirely. Vellamo, built at a larger scale and developed first as a spray-paint canvas, belongs to Steit’s location based series in which each work is made in, and about, the place it depicts. This one speaks for Finland.
Vellamo, the goddess of water, lakes and seas in Finnish mythology, appears as illustrated mermaid figures over a graduated blue ground. And here's the third twist: the stenciled text underneath her doesn't reference water at all. It reads Smell&Scent, a nod to the clean air of the Finnish countryside. A water deity, telling a story about land.
The Actual Plot Twist
Nothing here is new pretending to be old, and the old is left untouched out of respect. Laila's stool proportions sit under Steit's colour. A tool built for a farm that no longer exists now carries words about the senses that outlived it.
The twist isn't the paint, loud as it is. It's that a hundred-year-old shape, built for one woman's hands, is still exactly what you'd reach for today.
Senses Lyyti is a collaboration between carpenter Jari Karppinen and artist Steit Slings. Six stools, one for each sense, plus Vellamo, a larger piece made in Finland as part of Steit's Location Based series. All pieces are unique, built in Finnish pine and finished in MTN and Molotow spray paint, signed by both makers and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity.