4.3.–29.3.2026

I probably was 17 when I started understanding that the feeling of home is not about a particular
place but rather about how it feels. From there, my art practice was a tool to search for that in
my surroundings, in myself, in people, in the past, and in the present. In a way to process and
reflect on my own world, I started drawing faces and got hooked on visual storytelling and the
way colors overlap to express a story.

Colors can interpret feelings, and highlight a lot of details, while texture has its role in enriching
or reducing the density of an outcome. My work focuses mainly on portraits that are made of a
blend of both warm and cool color tones, and both figuration and abstraction. They are a
dialogue between the past and the present. The base is usually a tale, a tale that gave me a
vision to be created and led my instinct.

What Makes a Place Home focuses on the human condition and characteristics within the
complexities of feeling home. The works’ grounds are a collage of multiple different pieces that I
build together. I pick some shards out and place others in, draw a section on top, and play with
the form to finalize the puzzle until it makes sense to me. The aim is to contemplate belonging.
Over the last year, my work has been inspired by reading the Kalevala and learning about its
symbolic style. It is an epic that once helped shape a shared sense of identity and belonging to
many, and later played a role in the broader language debates that accompanied Finland’s
movement toward independence.

In this exhibition, I work with Kalevala-related motifs and narrative elements, and
reinterpret them through printmaking. The work is made through collage and digital
drawing first, and then through silkscreen in a stencil-based layering process. These
layered techniques reflect how memory and cultural meanings are formed gradually,
through accumulation and reinterpretation over time.

Through these works, I return to a simple question: what makes a place home?
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of the Arts Promotion Centre
Finland (Taike) and the Finnish Art Society (Suomen Taideyhdistys).