Onerva Luoma’s travelling fashion show is for library nerds only

One of the great ironies of clothing is that, despite our knowledge that it’s a basic human necessity, the majority of us still see it as a consumer product, bought and sold for as much as people are willing to pay. The Finnish costume designer Onerva Luoma plans to upend this conception with her travelling show “Lead Me out of here (even if I Do not Know if such a Place Exists)”. Described by Luoma as a “conceptual artwork that explores what a meaningful relationship with clothing might look like in the age of climate catastrophe,” the artist wants her work to be the prism through which we see clothes as much more than commodities.

The work – a selection of 55 different paintings using old clothing as their canvas – began in the midst of Finland’s COVID lockdowns when all the country’s theatres closed, essentially halting Luoma’s job as a costume designer. “At first, I started painting on old clothes just for fun. I posted pictures of the clothes on Instagram and people wanted to buy them, but for some reason selling them seemed impossible for me,” says Luoma. When the painted clothes began to pile up over lockdown, the artist began to think about how she could exhibit them, but a traditional gallery setting didn’t seem right. “It takes so much away from the clothes when you can’t wear them,” she said, “then it just hit me: a library would be a perfect place.”

According to Luoma, libraries are the only spaces in Finland where you can go and you don’t have to buy anything, so the setting made perfect sense to fulfil the work’s anti-consumerist aims. Anyone in possession of a free library card can rent a piece from Luoma’s collection, and they’ve already been doing so in their hundreds. “I assumed that people a bit like me might be interested in the paintings,” said Luoma, “[but] it has been a pleasure to find out that I was wrong. People of all ages and genders and very different kinds of people have been borrowing them.”

Taking over two years to complete all 55 garments, Luoma was primarily thinking about the environmental aspect of the work while painting. “The name [“Lead Me out of here (even if I Do not Know if such a Place Exists)”] is kind of an instruction manual for the artwork. It also has a slight dystopian echo, because for me this work is not just a feel-good story,” she says. “We live in the age of climate catastrophe and that’s why I wanted the name to be a bit about that too.”

Though naysayers might ask how a collection of free-to-rent clothing is going to stop the climate crisis, Luoma makes the sage observation that in order to avert disaster, we can’t just ‘eat less meat’ or ‘recycle more’, but completely rewire the way we think – a conversation her artwork attempts to begin. “I don’t think that, in an environmental catastrophe, just new green innovations are enough. We need to change our thinking in a very radical way and do a huge amount of emotional and thought work,” she says. “In that sense, the nature of this work is very anti-capitalist.”

At the moment, “Lead Me out of here” is a travelling artwork, but currently on display in Helsinki’s Rikhardinkatu library until the end of July. After then, it will be moving on to the city’s Vuosaari library in August, before travelling east to Porvoo in the autumn. Though all the tour stops are, for the time being, within the country, Lumoa has hopes to take the artwork international. “It would be fun to have the work also outside of Finland,” she says. “I'd be happy to take the artwork to new places until the clothes have to be made into rag rugs.”

“Lead Me out of here (even if I Do not Know if such a Place Exists)” is showing at the Rikhardinkatu Library, Helsinki until the end of July 2024. For more information head to onervaluoma.com