9.2.–3.3.2024
Avajaiset / Opening 8.2.2024 18:00-20:00

This photographic exhibition offers viewers the chance to pause and consider themes relating to death and mortality, and responses to personal grief. Photographer Joshua Cockroft’s motivation for the project has been to acknowledge our mortality, offer a space to gaze at the unseen and examine a taboo subject. The title of the work arose in conversation with a funeral director who noted that their job is focused on those left behind – that they are there to serve the living.
Many of the practices related to death now take place behind closed doors, hidden from sight, estranging us from this natural part of the life cycle. Cockroft gained access to different institutions related to laying the dead to rest such as morgues, funerary homes, crematoriums and cemeteries, and through his images wishes to extend this privilege of witnessing to others.
In the exhibition at Myymälä2, Cockroft expands the project by exploring personal grief through an installation of used votive candles and experimental photograms made with graveside flowers. Coming from a country where votive candles are not a common sight in graveyards, Cockroft found this Finnish custom of remembrance striking. The series of photograms are offered as a study of grief and show personal responses to loss. The photogram process involves laying an object on top of light-sensitive paper and exposing it to a light source, creating a translation of the physical object in silhouette. The resulting photographic works continue the memento mori tradition of still life and hover on the border of figurative and abstract, much like grief itself.

Joshua Cockroft (b. 1989) is a Helsinki-based photographic artist and educator from Halifax, England. He studied analogue practices at the University of Sunderland (2010) and is a graduate of Lahti Muotoiluinstituutti (2022). He uses photography to explore his environment and gain access to lesser seen corners of society, aiming to bring attention to overlooked or hidden aspects of familiar environments and explore our relationships with them. At the core of his photographic practice are analogue processes. In June 2024 he will exhibit a new body of work at Galleria Uusi Kipinä, Lahti.

The printing materials and framing of work in this exhibition was funded by a grant from the Patricia Seppälä foundation.