Surrounded by

Eeva Karhu’s new series Surrounded by consists of layered photographs, characteristic to her style, where she records perceptions of her surroundings inside a predetermined area. The series was photographed on an assortment of small islands situated on the Gulf of Finland during 2017 and 2018. However, they also invoke her experiences from a previous 1800km cycling tour around a larger island, Iceland. Each image records the smaller islands in locations equally divided onto the circumference of a circle, which are all overlaid onto a digital “multiple exposure”. Affectual experiences and powerful memories are transferred onto the images through masks Eeva Karhu places in front of her exposures. One of the inspirations for Karhu has been the work of Romantic-era painter William Turner, whose landscapes were created during a time when artists travelled to remote places where nature manifested its destructive powers in order to attain an experience of the sublime in nature. Experiences of the prodigious force and presence of nature, intermixed with capricious weather phases, also influence the images recorded in Eeva Karhu’s memory, and are reinterpreted within her pictures. Concurrently, the process of photographing the subsequent images slowly and alone, on the much calmer smaller islands, has been a very systematic and meditative process. In this manner, her pieces carry several stratified temporalities. In addition to nature, another vital point of departure in Karhu’s work is the investigation of perception and cognition. For Eeva Karhu, the compound viewpoints gathered from the perimeter of a circle and merged, work as a representation of both perceptual experience and the relationship between the self and the surrounding world. Life itself could be evidenced as an experience from a personal “island” and also through various masks as observations melt and merge with memories.