Fire and Water
Welcome to the opening ceremonies on Tuesday September 9, 2025 from 17:00 to 19:00.
I started drawing with pencils at home in 2019 when I couldnʼt get to my studio because of renovations. I experimented to see what would happen if I drew in the same way as I paint, so that the picture builds itself free of pre-planned forms of things that are moving in my mind and heart at that moment, from what I perceive inside myself and in the world around me, and how it feels.
Although working with a line can be slower than working with colour, I still find it to be a fast and fiery medium; it sharply captures details and distinguishes the important from the insignificant. In my mind, lines are connected to the expression of ideas and thoughts, while I see colour as changeable, fluid, and mobile, like water. Colour can easily break down boundaries and shapes and combine them in new ways. I wanted to explore what would happen to my pictures when I switched to such a different medium.
I found myself building masses and overlapping layers, suggestive forms of thought and spaces that seemed to be in constant change and motion, becoming something else. The lines bundled together and unravelled into previously unknown vistas. By drawing in layers, the forms merged into another and became vague, sometimes disappearing and morphing into new ones. I watched and let it happen.
Instead of focusing on form, my thoughts revolved around elements that I associate with colour: brightness and dullness, contrasts, soft and hard transitions, surface and depth, which I wanted to move around the paper. These pictures had to be made in grayscale, I cannot imagine them in colours. But still, in my mind, they are in some strange way “colourful”.
As it did when painting, I often ended up in a dead end. Everything looked chaotic, and creating some meaningful order and natural interrelationships required some serious pondering, turning the paper up and around and just gazing at it. Most often, the puzzle was solved when I started to understand what I had been drawing and why. Then the picture started to live in my mind as words also, and it got a name. The picture brings up something initially hidden into the sphere of conscious thinking.
The exhibition includes drawings from 2020 to 2025.
I am a visual artist based in Helsinki. I draw and paint, using mostly simple and light materials, such as different water-soluble painting techniques, pencil, charcoal and paper. I explore the emerging image in relation to how reality appears to me and why. I graduated from the Alfa Art School, where I have also been teaching since 2021.
Artwork above: Escape, 69×100 cm, pencil drawing on paper, 2021-2023
