Cactus Gallery LA
WILD STRAWBERRIES (Oma maa mansikka) by artist Ulla Anobile
$ 175.00
Hand stitched and embroidered wool/rayon felt, sequins, kebab sticks
5” x 7” (sticks 9”)
Note for this postcard:
This piece pays homage to my childhood summers; picking wild strawberries, knowing all the best places where they could be found, including the one right behind the cowhouse dung heap!
The subtitle, ‘Oma maa mansikka’, comes from an old Finnish saying: ‘One’s own land: strawberry; other people’s land: blueberry.’ In modern times, this is taken to mean, more or less, ‘no place like home’. It certainly tells you which berry is valued to be the best.
But according to some research, that saying - in Finnish ’oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka’ - dates back to the days of slash-and-burn agriculture, and the rules of land ownership.
When you staked a claim on the land you had just cleared by burning, it belonged to you. And whatever grew there - wild strawberries grew abundantly on such land - was yours to take. But shady forests, where wild blueberries preferred to grow, belonged to someone else (the community, the landowner; it can get complicated here), and so were not yours to utilize.
