Silence has never been easy for me. My mind is full of loose threads—ideas, images, memories—that I keep connecting and rearranging. I’ve learned that silence is not the absence of sound, but a moment when the mind settles into one thing.

As a child in the Finnish countryside, I found quiet in reading. The visiting library bus was one of the week’s highlights. Books offered me both escape and a way to understand my place in the world.

Writing became another form of immersion. I learned to concentrate with headphones on, music filling the space around me. What mattered was focus—a protected bubble where thinking and making converge.

When the mind resists stillness, the body helps. Walking in the forest, holding a camera, working with textiles—these practices bring thoughts closer to the present moment.

My artistic work grows from attentiveness. I walk often with my dog, observing how plants appear, bloom, fade and return through the seasons. This comes partly from family memory: my grandmother was a folk healer, and my mother knew the plants of meadow and garden.

One hot summer day by Heposuo bog, I cycled with a camera and photographed cotton grass glowing in bright light. For a while there was nothing else: only light, plants, breath and the next photograph.

By the Kemijoki river, I photographed meadowsweet. Later, I noticed horsetails in shaded green clusters. Even ordinary plants looked generous and strange when I stayed with them long enough. I collected and dried them, then scanned them into new images in the visual research laboratory.

Artistic work rarely begins with a finished idea. It grows through trying, failing, simplifying and trying again. The body remembers what the mind doesn’t need to explain: how to hold a camera, how to adjust an image, how to continue.

Through this work, I understand silence as embodied attention. It appears when I’m fully engaged with something material: a plant, an image, a line of text. Inside the making, the mind becomes quieter.

This is the kind of silence I can trust: not perfect stillness, but living concentration. A silence found through the hands, eyes, body and the nearby world.

Galleria Kopio ja Galleria Puoti

Kuiskauksia – Whispers
8.-25.9.2026

F-talo, 1. krs, Lapin yliopisto, Yliopistonkatu 8, Rovaniemi
Avoinna: ma–pe klo 9–19.30, la–su ja arkipyhinä suljettu.

This exhibition forms part of the research project How to Live Together in Sonic Democracy, funded by the Kone Foundation and led by Professor Jan Schacher from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Collaborators include Professor Jaana Erkkilä-Hill and others from the University of Lapland and Lapland University of Applied Sciences.

These works connect to visual reflections on silence from a book in progress. Silence can be loud, calm, expectant or threatening—experienced both indoors and outdoors, and within one’s own mind.