INCENTIVE WORKSHOP ®

Incentive Workshop ® is a workshop in Sastamala, Finland, producing different tools for playing, always with an artistic twist.

The workshop is part of the local cultural history and tradition. The Sastamala area used to have several t oyworkshops, from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960’s. These workshops produced traditional wooden toys. In 2018, Sastamala Museum opened an exhibition on the areas rich toy history, titled “Like Play. The Story of Toy Workshops in Sastamala”.

Incentive Workshop creates art works you can touch, and participate in their creative process, through play. In addition to the artistic vein, the workshop’s guiding principles are combining traditional organic material and modern form, and understanding the new meaning of the playing aids as aligned by the changing idea of the player and the playing contexts.

Incentive Workshop has two different categories of artistic aids for playing: unique block sculptures, and numbered block sets resembling these sculptures. The sculptures and the block sets are hand-made unique pieces. The works are designed by artist Kai Ruohonen, and their parts produced by carpenters Kari Haikonen and Timo Lehtinen.

The idea of the re-sculptured block set is to enable an interactive and actor-driven approach to meeting the work of art: you can dismantle and reconstruct the piece into its original form - or into a completely new meaning. The Living Sculpture can be built into the form that aligns with your own vision.

The Living Sculpture is made of blocks produced from different typed of hardwood, with an unfinished surface. The wood used in the sculpture are birch, mahogany, hazel tree, and oak. When ordering the work, you can inquire whether other hardwood could also be used in parts of the sculpture.

Incentive Workshop ® follows ecological thinking and the principles of sustainability. We trust local know-how and raw material when building the works, and when we borrow material from the nature, we pay it back in collaboration with the Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation.

Incentive Workshop’s first work is Living Sculpture I – Human-shaped Reconstruction Kit. The Living Sculpture is created by puppet artist Roosa Halme, based on the Human- Shaped Reconstruction Kit - block set developed by artist Kai Ruohonen. The blocks used in the Living Sculpture I are made by carpenters Kari Haikonen and Timo Lehtinen. The Living Sculpture has been used as a prop in Halme’s Block Theatre since 2011.

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