Dancing Together: A Ballad is an indoor reimagining of Kaarina Kaikkonen’s large-scale public sculpture, Dancing Together, which was created in the outside in the public realm in St Helier in the summer of 2024. It incorporated over 700 shirts donated by people in Jersey during the summer and many of those who donated a short also shared a meaningful memory or story connected to the shirt.

The currently running newly conceived artwork, which has been re-designed to be enjoyed within an exhibition space setting, will run through until Sunday 1 December. During this time the installation will be available to view, free of charge, from 10.30am to 6pm every day except Mondays. This project has been sponsored by Butterfield

For this overall project Kaarina Kaikkonen has created two distinct works that bring together the different stories of people and their shirts - ordinary, sad, courageous, joyful, humorous - that reflect the people of Jersey. In the more intimate space of ArtHouse Jersey at Capital House, visitors are invited to get up close to these very personal sentiments, each garment holding a world of its own memory, offering Islanders the chance to truly connect with the many moving human stories that held the original Charing Cross public artwork together.

Dancing Together and Dancing Together: A Ballad, both created especially for Jersey, are the latest works in a series of shirt installations that Kaarina Kaikkonen has created inside galleries, museums and outdoor settings across the world over the past thirty years, from Shanghai to Madrid, Santiago, Chile to Rome and across Finland and Scandinavia. Each work responds to the particular architectures, histories and natural elements of its location, recycling materials to create an artwork that speaks to a sense of a collective ‘body’, of time suspended and a poetic reflection of memory, loss and our shared experience as humans and the different environments in which we live.