Welcome to the homepage of KATJA MUTTILAINEN.(these pages are still a bit under construction, and some browsers unfortunately lack to keep the layout. Patience please!) I am a Lighting Designer MA and teaching about light is my passion. I have created these pages to show some of my projects that I have found very interesting and I think they will tell the most about who I am, and what kind of lighting I love to do. My guideline in everything is to make discreet lighting, better than a show off. I always respect the performing artist and I want the performer to feel at home in my lights. Architect Friedrich Hundertwasser has once said that a human being has three skins; the houses they live in, the clothes they wear and the natural skin that holds their organs inside. When I am thinking about stage lighting, I am making both the home or a house for the performer, as well as the clothes. A choreographer once told me that it feels like one got the fanciest clothes on when one gets to the direct light on the stage. I also think stage as an architectural form, as a working place of a very spatial profession. For me light in theater is more about a series of spaces changing around the performer rather than creating moods. Performer also needs to feel safe on the set. Light is the only element on the stage that allows a performer to move freely through it as well as be inside of it, in order to be seen. The best comment ever I have heard about my lighting from a dancer was that we shared a same moment, she was able to feel me present on stage through my lights and running the lights in that show. Looking back my professional history I have (luckily) ended up working with some special groups that are sometimes forgotten in our highly sophisticated art world. Those groups are mainly mental health patiences, different-from-norm human beings and intellectually or physically challenged persons (2007 saari ~ island), non-professionals and different aged children (Kukaan ei tiedä/ Nobody Knows). All as performers or audience. I have also worked with several people/groups whose native language and customs are not my own. The most remembered moment of teaching must have been when 2 sign language translators were working next to me as I was teaching a deaf girl from Canada,who lived in Finland. After this she became my workmate when I did lighting for Finnish Theatre of Deaf, Totti. In my future I hope to be working with light. Not anymore so much with stage lighting but I wish to widen my horizon to be working in unusual places. - with sound scape's, light and space, I would like to make people see and sense beauty or beasts in abnormal places. To see my light resonate and communicate with surroundings. Community art with light! I am also willing to make most of my life experiences as a teacher. I am highly interested to study pedagogics and combine my work with social art within the communities. Interaction is very important for me, in every surrounding. | Click HAPPENING NOW! link also on the right -----> for more info Links on the right ----> will also guide you through my pages if you want to skip "intro".     |