12.2. — 8.3.2026

The drawings in the exhibition were inspired by my grandmother’s old swimsuit I found last spring.

The dark blue fabric is thick, stiff and coarse, and there is more of it than in swimsuits today. It looks handmade. I try it on over my own clothes. It is either too big or too tight in the wrong places. The bust is a saggy pile of fabric. I take the swimsuit off and look at it closely. In the inner seam, there is a small, faded and curled-up label.

The exhibition features pencil drawings that draw on items that have belonged to women in my family. Around these emotionally charged items, like my great-aunt’s darning needles, my aunt’s herbarium and my grandmother’s photo album, clothes and fabrics, I have created a series of drawings that explore time and its layers, the past, and its simultaneous familiarity and strangeness.

The drawings focus on the relationships between materials, their meanings, and temporal dimensions. Slow, repetitive drawing creates a connection to the time of the items used as a starting point, to manual labor, and to making and repairing things by hand. Many layers must be drawn on top of one another before they are finally dark, just as thick as the blue fabric.

Susanna Kesänen (b. 1983, Elimäki) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, working with drawing, photography, and comics. Kesänen graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the photography program at Aalto University in 2017. Her works have been shown, among others, in solo exhibitions at Poriginal Gallery (2024) and Galleria Rajatila (2023). Her debut comic book, Ja 10 muuta joita en muista, was published in 2021. In 2023, Kesänen participated in the Kuš! comics residency in Riga.