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"Hazard and creation in a beautiful union. This is how one could describe Marje Toska’s exhibition "Mother Earth".
"It was a game. In the beginning it wasn’t to become much of anything else," says Marje Toska about one of the exhibits in Piteå.
After a walk in the woods with her children she began to work with plaster and papier mâché. Allowing cones, leaves and branches to become part of the mixture was just an experiment. An experiment that later turned out to be the basis for series of works of art about our earth. (...)
The series that was meant to depict the beautiful, fine world couldn't avoid being influenced by the events taking place in the world as a result of the World Trade Center catastrophe, 11th of September 2001. (...) Marje Toska wishes to put the focus at how people harm the Earth. In the current work of art this thought is symbolized by the "cakes" becoming smaller and smaller."
(Martina Strand "Marje Defending Mother Earth")
"People in the former Soviet Bloc, East-European countries often took a great interest in the language. Living under a dictatorship necessitates a coded and ambiguous communication. If one really wanted to know what was meant, one had to excavate the surface of the word, says the linguist Julia Kristeva.
Translated into the reality of the visual arts, the geometrical and formal expression of the Russian Constructivists became strengthened aside the unequivocal message of the socialist realists.
Marje Toska (...) grew up in Tallinn during the Soviet occupation. She was educated both as a concert pianist and an artist. In 1982 she moved to Sweden. She is best known for her leather boxes, but today Marje works with anything from canvas and rubber to graphics and painting.
As the geometry of straight lines is present in all creations of her artistic career, it’s easy to track her artistic roots back to Malevitch and co. She says, however, that she is more inspired by the folk-arts of the whole world."
(Berit Linden "Toska True to Geometrics", "Smålandsposten")
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