Pauliina Heinänen
Recollections
29 March – 21 April 2019
On Good Friday 19th of March and on Easter Sunday 21st of April the gallery is open 12-5.pm.
On Easter Monday the gallery is closed as usual.
When you place your hand into a hole in a rock, you will not only feel the warmth of all the past years, when the sun in the top corner of a paper had a face, you will also feel the weight of your body against your wrist and your thoughts will focus on the veins in your wrist, the area where they bulge on the skin, just like the tired and twisted veins in mom’s hands. Sometimes I would fiddle with them and lift dad’s belly hair and loose skin to create mountains – you never knew what kind of formation the hair between the little fingers would turn into.
Recollections of a place that I miss. It is an island and all I have left are these black and white photographs.
The works in the exhibition were born out of a desire to dive into a photograph, to return to a place and time where the photos were taken. I used a tool to scratch the surface of the photographs. I go through the bumps and holes, the surfaces along which my eyes wander. I reach for the ground in the photos, pursuing it as if I was still there with the soles of my feet against the rocks heated by the sun.
The works are based on questions about presence, absence, remembering and the nature of a photograph. The rocks that were captured in the photos have been and still are in my recollections, but at the same time they are no longer the same. They have become two-dimensional, a black and white surface that is blurred by noise. The rocks have become an image.
When I scratch the surface of a photograph, some information is inevitably lost. The scratching leaves a white cutting surface and the lines create a new image. An attempt to get inside a photograph will break the surface – it is destroyed by the pursuit of a memory. My eyes move to the other side of the photo, from the inside to the surface.
Through my work I am more visible and no longer hidden behind a photograph. I am present in a different way. A photograph is always somewhat absent. It refers to somewhere else, to a time that once existed. I am absorbed by memories and images of our culture – my identity is formed by layers of past moments. In a way, I am also always absent. I experience the world through my experiences which refer to the past and to photographs of me and others.
This is my attempt to belong somewhere – both in a work and in a place.
Pauliina Heinänen (b. 1992) is a visual artist whose themes are related to absence, longing and identity. In her works she often addresses interfaces and deals with larger entities through details. Heinänen mainly works with photography and moving images. The artist’s works have been on display at various solo and joint exhibitions in Finland and abroad. She graduated from the Lahti Institute of Design in 2015, majoring in photography. She is currently finishing her master’s studies in photography at Aalto University.
