Johanna Ketola: A View

Galleria Huuto / Exhibitions
24.9.–18.10.2026
As I have become increasingly aware of my ever-deepening relationship with pine trees, I have realised that I have, after all, spent much of my life surrounded by pine forests. Yet it is during the years spent at Honkamäki—my current, pine-dominated home—that trees have come especially close to me. Sometimes their quiet presence and stillness have created a difficult-to-define restlessness or, when I was getting used to the silence, even boredom. More often, however, they have calmed, enlivened, or challenged me, and, very rarely, as if rewarding patience, they have seemed to slightly part their shared, silent surface with the surrounding world.

At Honkamäki there is an old pine tree that I have observed for 15 years. This spring, I observed it from a point of view I had never used before. Suddenly, it seemed to be both particularly present and unreachable at the same time. At times, it felt as though the pine tree was intruding into the space where I was staying. Its matter-of-fact body felt comforting, threatening, intimate, and alien all at once. It simply was. At the same time, I thought of it as some kind of warning sign.

In the photographs presented in the exhibition, the space from which the pine tree has been observed is almost empty. Its angular banality frames and ultimately makes the old pine visible, even though a floorboard, thermometer, sink, or blind is undoubtedly just as much of a mystery as the pine itself. In the installation, the space functions as a kind of pause, a blink of an eye, or a breath, in which perception is both interrupted and continued, leaping across dimensions of time and place.

The pine tree escapes definition, classification, and attempts at appropriation, even when its silent surface is photographed or observed for years. The personal significance of the experience, as well as fruitful theoretical approaches to it, likewise leave it a mystery. Yet sometimes it reveals itself in a particular way. The work A view is an installation that seeks to portray curiosity towards another kind of body and its multilayered silence. It is an attempt to listen to the pine from a space and time that are both distant and near, the same as and different from the pine’s own body. In addition to empathetic observation and silence, the work is inspired by corporeality, the cycle of the seasons, deep ecology, and the age of multiple crises.

Johanna Ketola (b. 1978) is a visual artist living and working in both Helsinki and Central Finland. She works with video, photography, installation, text, and performance. Ketola graduated from the Time and Space Arts Department of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki and from the Photography Department of the Lahti Institute of Design. She has also studied photographic art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Ketola has been awarded the Central Finland Regional Award by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.


Free entrance
Gallery Week Finland 2026
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