Paula Häiväoja

Tell us about yourself and how Paula Häiväoja was present in your life. 

I am Johanna Häiväoja, a visual artist. I work in Normandy, France, and in Finland, mainly as a sculptor. The jewelry and clothing designer Paula Häiväoja was my mother. She is a role model to me as an artist and as an independent woman, and she was important to my family – my children Sara and Leo – as someone who also helped my French-born children make Finnish culture and its inner landscape their own. 

Do you remember a moment or a situation that captures your mother’s relationship to form and beauty – not only as an artist but as a person? 

Sometime in the 1960s a French fashion magazine came to photograph my parents’ house, and my mother was nervously arranging things into place, to the millimetre. Then one of the magazine’s stylists brought in a bouquet of flowers to ”liven up” the view – into the bin it went, very quickly. Paula’s built-in sense of style and her absolute sense of form did not allow any plan to be made public before it was perfect. 

Growing up in your family’s artist home: was there a moment or a habit through which your mother’s presence as an artist affected you directly, and affected the way you began to look at the world? 

A passionate attitude towards making, and the refining of drawings and models until everything is exactly right – and also an awareness of the value of one’s own work, and of looking after it. 

What might people not know about Paula Häiväoja? 

Despite her great interest in music, Paula was a hopelessly bad singer. And the worst of it was that her own good ear told her it was going wrong, but she still could not get the note right. 

Your mother spoke of jewelry as ”a utility for the mind” – not as decoration but as part of a person’s whole expression. What do you think she meant by that? 

A piece of jewelry – or a work of art more generally – is often acquired to mark an important moment or matter in life. It is connected to some powerful feeling or encounter, and it then works as a concrete, tangible thing that ties us, even years later, to that moment or that person. 

”Jewelry is a utility for the mind, just as a refreshing garment is. But in this a piece of jewelry is the opposite of a garment: it is itself – independent of the wearer. The wearer can add something to its presence through movement, but cannot change its nature.” – Paula Häiväoja 

Paula was a pioneer in a field that at the time was almost entirely dominated by men. Did she talk at home about what that meant to her, or where she drew her strength from? 

If it is still harder for women to advance in an artistic career than it is for men, and to combine a possible family life with it, then in the 1950s and 1960s it was almost impossible. I do not actually even understand how Paula managed – against all the resistance, both outside the family and inside it – to design and realise all those tremendously fine pieces of jewelry, and to raise me alongside it all. When a family has two artists and one of them is a man, a competitive situation is inevitable. And at that time, at least, it did not advance a woman’s career. 

”I do not actually even understand how Paula managed, against all the resistance, to design all those pieces of jewelry and to raise me alongside it all.” 

You are a visual artist and a sculptor yourself. Do you see your mother’s language of form in your own work? 

My mother’s language of form has only become familiar to me as a whole in recent years, as I have been working with the archives – I had of course been immersed in it throughout my childhood, without understanding how fine Paula’s work is. Of course, her influence has found its way into my own working: the pursuit of airiness, of flight and of lightness, which in sculpture are still the very hardest things to achieve. The achievements of science and technology that often inspired Paula are reflected in my own work too. 

What in her thinking or her life’s work feels particularly relevant today? 

Jewelry is more than decoration. It is ”a utility for the mind, at its best a miniature artwork that travels with you, intellectually inspiring, emotionally exciting, reflecting the artist’s reality”. In the middle of all the virtual and digital fluff, a piece of jewelry that travels with you is something you can actually touch – and something that can actually touch you. 

Your mother is regarded as a renewer of Finnish jewelry art – avant-garde and bold. Do you recognise that in the person you knew? 

Paula was a little bit from another planet – or from the future. She was bold and tenacious and had the stamina to swim against the current – quite often, in fact – which in a Finnish society that strives for conformity has never been very popular. I still wonder whether anyone really knew her, she was such a many-sided person. 

If you had to capture your mother’s memory in a single sentence, what would it be? 

”I found my way into a world I never knew existed”, Johanna Häiväoja says, quoting her mother, the artist Paula Häiväoja.