I’m an architectural photographer, born in 1971 in Jyväskylä and working in the Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland from 1995. In the years 1998–2018 I also practiced as a photographic artist, having solo and joint exhibitions in Finland and abroad. My themes were natural and man-made environments, unintended cultural landscapes, traces of human’s presence in vacant spaces, feeling of misery, caring and consolation that are expressed by worn materials and accidental still lives.
Why the past tense? I experienced a crisis in 2017 and quit my artistic practice. Lately I’ve been concentrating on my work in the Alvar Aalto Museum, exploring possibilities for a meaningful and sustainable life and looking for a creative process free from pressure and outside of commercial sphere.
I sometimes used recycled materials as the base for my photographic works; plywood, concrete, paper and plastic. The imagery came from border areas of nature and culture, milieus under construction or decay.
I observe the pilgrimage of matter through our world with devout, almost religious interest. The grounds for my decisions are, above all, aesthetic, but aesthetics are intertwined with the history; the past and present pilgrimage of the material object.
To be a photographer is to be a witness, and I also want my works to witness the reality of the world through their matter. That is why I choose materials that are everywhere around me, materials that almost drown me in their omnipresence.
The materialism of our society is actually a form of contempt towards the material itself. We manufacture non-degradable objects to be thrown on the roadside, into refuse dumps and into the ocean, to be taken away from their natural cycle. Plastic waste is made of oil, and oil comes from the prehistoric forests. We have created a process of reverse alchemy: creating waste from pure, honest, and natural materials. Materialism could also mean respecting every tiny piece of matter, to know what it is useful for, and the wisest way of using it.