Known for her timeless black and white portraits, mostly of children and young people, Nelli Palomäki takes an enigmatic look at evolving beings, family relationships and memory.
After a first solo show in 2018, Galerie Les filles du calvaire is pleased to present Speed of Dark by photographer Nelli Palomäki. Known for her timeless black and white portraits, mostly of children and young people, Nelli Palomäki takes an enigmatic look at evolving beings, family relationships and memory. Here at the gallery, she presents a new series of photographs marked by long periods spent at home in the Finnish countryside. Guided by the circumstances she took a deeper look what lies close to her. Working strictly around her house and the garden, with her close ones, the artist has developed an intimate and personal body of work. She questions our relationship to time and our daily environment, the duality of taming and wildness by instrumentalizing the alternations of light and darkness.
Speed of Dark by Nelli Palomäki (extract) :
« Darkness is both a mental and a concrete matter. Although the dark is taking over at times, it’s the light that is leading our way.
Nothing controls the process of making a photograph like light, or the lack of it. We live in a country where darkness seems to swallow us every autumn. Observing the light, and the absence of it, becomes obsessive. Mostly the light is at its most beautiful just before slipping away – or just between the arise and all too bright again.
All this recent time spent home made me realize how little I see, (or rather – stop and look!), what surrounds me. The beauty of the mundane, and the beauty of the cycle of the year, so strongly connected to the amount of light – and the dark. Garden waking up, blooming and dying again. Children secretly growing, myself reluctancly aging. Four seasons alternating and defining our spirits. This all endlessly repeating. Each year, by the end of the summer we are already frightened by the following months of darkness, on winter solstice we again hooray the light and bright that is on its way.”
