Artist Statement

I distill colours from flowers, leaving them pale and colourless. The extracted colour pigments I preserve in various ways and display them alongside the white flowers. The technique is based on a notion that most organisms, both in the plant and the animal world, seem to lose their colours in death – flowers wither and bodies blanch. Thus, all the colours in nature signal the presence of a living force. The result in my three-dimensional paintings is a poetic separation of the vivid life energy (the preserved colours) from their empty, pale bodies (the decoloured flowers).

In addition, over the past decade, I have developed a colour palette consisting solely of ‘conceptual natural pigments’. I prepare the pigments for my artworks by grinding a wide variety of raw materials, such as meteorites, animal bones and seashells, as well as by extracting colours from medicinal herbs, mushrooms and algae. Each material holds unique knowledge. I view the pigments as collaborators whose individual ‘experiences’ define the conceptual message of the artwork. Through the self-collected materials, many of the themes connect to a certain natural site around the world, wherein the more universal themes are addressed with unique materials collected with the help of specialists.

My works are marked by the artistic interpretation of alchemy, which explores the universe through natural materials, and animism, especially the Finnish nature worship. What alchemy and animism have in common is the perception of all surrounding nature as living and sensing. Medieval alchemists studied natural materials, which they also used to make colours. Through the materials, they sought to understand the surrounding universe as well as the interconnectedness of everything in the cosmos and the individual’s role among all others; oneself. One of the most important steps in alchemy was repeated distillation, which left the purest essence of the substance – and the alchemist – in the glass flask.