Maisemankatsomus

My work consists of series of landscape paintings. I have studied an archetype of a landscape where people’s operations and actions can be seen. In each painting I am showing human impact on the environment and the landscape, but in a way in which neither people nor their actions are visible. Allusions can be subtle, almost invisible, as we can be unresponsive to the landscapes surrounding us.

The inspiration and the source for my visual observations have been journeys by train and the landscapes that surround me. Window-framed compositions are always the same: landscape loses its perspective and dimensional effect in the sense that the person looking at the landscape is actually able to approach the view. The landscapes are flat and out of proportion, a silent film projected on a window screen, for us only to see as we pass by.

Landscapes are also pictures of society, where the land between cities is covered by and asphalt so that people and products can be efficiently transported and circulated through the cultural landscapes of industrialised society.

I am interested in the ways impressions and ideologies are produced in national romantic landscape paintings, or pictures of nature in tourist brochures, even though the subjects of my paintings differ from both. In my landscape paintings the cables of ski lifts run through hillsides, sunsets fade into city smog and modern forestry landscapes are spotted with clear-cut areas.

As my paintings are pictures of landscapes, they are also paintings of the process of development aspiring to a complete series. I want to make this process visible in the installation and selection of the paintings.