Flower Photography
Can It Be Contemporary Art ?
When I introduce myself I say I photograph flowers. I create flower arrangement or composition of flowers and photograph it. Flower photographer might sound silly and connotations of it. One can say it is not the most respected way to make art. It is way too beautiful or pretty and naive. Or is it? Can it be contemporary art ?
Beauty Heals, 2022
For me flowers are ingredients and material. I create a flower work for my camera and I have everything put in right places before I take a photo. I don’t change or add flowers in postproduction. For me it is important to have this skill and I am an artisan with flowers. Camera is a tool that I want to hide away from my art work. I create painterly photographs and I can manipulate colors in postproduction. The world I’m creating is something else than reality.
Flower arrangement, 2022
My inspiration comes from Dutch Golden Age painters and their use of light. I am also very fascinated about surreal and in my work I try always go beyond normal and real. Time is also interesting point of view. When you take a photo time stops. You can’t see what happened before and you can only imagine what happens next. It is very unnatural to have these still moments. In nature nothing ever stops, nature is all about the movement and change. Flowers change like us, they get old. Only we people want to stop time because time is fleeting from us and it takes away so many things even though it gives too. But we are vain. When I’m working I’m having a dialog with my flowers. Maybe about the bigger questions that bothers me or just vain thoughts of daily life. I combine fresh, wilting and dried flowers. I want to respect the whole life circle of the flower. Imperfection is very fascinating.
Stilleben I, 2021
Life and death is very present when I work with flowers. I have said that I got flowers as a heritage from my mom who died suddenly 2016. That is the year when I began to learn to work with flowers and I began seriously photograph them too. It helped me through difficult time like painting that I was also doing a lot during that time. My first flower photography related exhibition was called Kesken Juhlien ( Leaving party before it is over). The year was 2017. It was about how I got through sorrow of death of my mother. In exhibition I had paintings, photographs of flower arrangements, ceramics and real flower arrangements that wilted during the exhibition. That was a beginning for my journey I’m on now.
Wild and Wilted, 2017
I don’t want to explain my art too much. I already made a work and named it and that should speak for itself.
Three Irises, 2019
Writing down all this is also a dialogue with myself. It is hard to get all my thoughts together and that is why I wrote this text. I get closer the real question why I make art with flowers and you know they are not just flowers that I can say. Maybe they are a bridge between me and the world I’m living in and the other side or reality we can not see. It is a good place to escape the reality. I have had few losses in my life and those have changed me and I feel I need my own space where I can be without feeling emptiness and despair. Flowers do give me comfort and joy but with them I can also express myself as an artist.
C’est La Vie Lily, 2021
xoxo
Kreetta
