Yhtehsulavundu · Merging into One
A foremother’s vision, a holographic bird, and a wall from which the Tree of Life emerges · · ·
Yhtehsulavundu is Livvi-Karelian for merging into one. It is the moment when difference melts away: human and tree become one and the same, a horse and its rider gallop as a single light. A plant’s leaf becomes a bee’s legs.
The exhibition opened at Galleria Becker in my hometown of Jyväskylä, Central Finland, in June 2026.
Karelian soil, imagined wings
This work grows out of my Karelian roots, and out of the käzipaikku, a long ritual cloth that has been central to many Karelian people, through every threshold of life, from birth to death. I learned to make käzipaikku under the Karelian master Julia Salminen. At the center of this exhibition is an authentic käspaikka whose pattern my foremother designed two hundred years ago. I intend to keep expanding it in the exhibitions still to come.
I work in painting, ceramics, textile, animation, interactive projection, and holography. I make my own paints and inks from natural, archival, non-toxic materials. Each way of making opens a different view, and together they become one conversation.
My watercolours are my own, mixed from gum arabic, glycerin, clove oil, and sometimes honey. I often model patterns digitally, and laser cut or 3D print them for use with traditional media. I mix my oil paints using safe and sustainable pigments and walnut oil. My digital art uses brushes and textures designed to feel tactile, almost touchable.
In the exhibition space, you can hear me speaking in Karelian, my grandmother’s mother tongue that got cut off in my family. It is its own language, the closest living relative of Finnish, and critically endangered.
” Not all merging is complete. Some pieces here hold only longing, the wish to belong to something that perhaps can no longer be fully reached.
Yhtehsulavundu began as a way of finding my way back into my own hands and my roots. Every pattern here grows from Karelian textile tradition, passed down through generations of ancestors who stitched their world into cloth.
” I’m continuing what my foremother started. I hope someone, generations from now, adds to it too.
In the timeless symbols of käzipaikku, one can see a fusion between human and nature. The human, the botanical, the divine, can all appear in one symbol. Horse and rider glide as one. The bird and the horse can also be one and the same: in them, strength and freedom merge.
I use the oldest käzipaikku technique, the double running stitch (Holbein stitch; Finnish: etupistokirjonta), a reversible technique that produces identical designs on both sides of the linen cloth.
I create and gift käzipaikkus for those closest to me in accordance with Karelian tradition. I also continue to work with a käzipaikku design my foremother from Mančinsuari made 200 years ago. For me it is a way of collaborating with my ancestor, using a visual language that transcends place and time.
Belonging without losing shape
Yhtehsulavundu is an exhibition about what happens when the boundaries between things we normally keep separate begin to dissolve: human and animal, self and ancestor, body and symbol, the seen and the unseen. For anyone unfamiliar with Karelian culture, the exhibition still speaks plainly, because its real subject is universal: how identity, memory, and belonging are never fixed things but living processes of merging, one generation’s hands passing something into the next without ever losing what it means. The exhibition doesn’t argue for a fixed identity; it offers a different way to think about belonging, one where you can be part of something without your own shape disappearing.
