En Plein Air Luminism Spring 1, 2024
Eeva Karhu’s series 'En Plein Air', (trans. In the Open Air), reflects her experience of walking through nature each day. She notes that the most striking seasonal changes reveal themselves in the evolving colours of the trees’ foliage. Her inner state — her thoughts and emotions — influences how the landscape appears to her, shaping its atmosphere and guiding her interpretation of the world around her. She describes this relationship between herself and nature as a continuous, shared conversation.
The images are created using a collage-based process rather than her earlier opaque layering, where each image would consist of multiple photographs. Each layer remains visible, as Karhu deliberately exposes the structure of the work, choosing only the elements that contribute to the final composition. The way she works with light produces marks that echo the qualities of painted brushstrokes. Viewed from afar, the images suggest paintings; up close, their photographic nature becomes clearer through the presence of fine detail. Through this distinctive method, Karhu presents a lasting and contemplative vision of nature.
"Walking my path and picking up the details I collect the memory of my time on the walk.
Nature is changing during the different seasons. Light varies depending on the time of the day. The most significant shift is in the leaves of the trees and the colours around me. My cognition plays an important role of what I see and how I see my surroundings. My feelings and thoughts colour the view and affect the atmosphere around me - we are in everlasting dialogue.
My way of working is similar to as before: I walk the same circular path and take photographs looking towards the horizon. The difference with this series is that I use a new technique while combining them: collage. Fragments of each photograph create the final image.
Before I was compressing time, now I am collecting fragments of it." Eeva Karhu
Eeva Karhu (born 1980, Kirkkonummi, Finland) studied photography at Helsinki's Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She uses nature and its seasonal passing as her guide to measure and translate our world by the power of its presence in our daily lives.
'When Eeva Karhu walks out of her front door some thirteen kilometres from the centre of Helsinki, she very much looks as if she intends to walk in a straight line. She takes a photograph and heads for the horizon. Her works are full of the horizon, each individual work is the amalgam of 86 different photographs, harvesting light from one moment to the next. The result is not just one place, but an emotional space which she travels through to find the beginning and ending of every day, a passage of time. After a while of looking at her photographs one starts seeing a single figure in the centre of the picture. It is coming to claim us rather like Omar Sharif in the scene where he slowly appears out of the desert in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Though there is an element of the same purity as in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, she is not pursuing the near perfect horizontal line of the sea or desert. Her feet are firmly on Finnish soil and the pictures trace her path to the horizon and back. If she lived in a desert or on the sea her method would only require two photographs, one at the point of departure and the other at the point she decreed the horizon, but the trees, houses, hillocks, bushes and other features of the landscape on her doorstop requires her to halt 86 times, and take another picture of another horizon.' (Alistair Hicks)
The images are created using a collage-based process rather than her earlier opaque layering, where each image would consist of multiple photographs. Each layer remains visible, as Karhu deliberately exposes the structure of the work, choosing only the elements that contribute to the final composition. The way she works with light produces marks that echo the qualities of painted brushstrokes. Viewed from afar, the images suggest paintings; up close, their photographic nature becomes clearer through the presence of fine detail. Through this distinctive method, Karhu presents a lasting and contemplative vision of nature.
"Walking my path and picking up the details I collect the memory of my time on the walk.
Nature is changing during the different seasons. Light varies depending on the time of the day. The most significant shift is in the leaves of the trees and the colours around me. My cognition plays an important role of what I see and how I see my surroundings. My feelings and thoughts colour the view and affect the atmosphere around me - we are in everlasting dialogue.
My way of working is similar to as before: I walk the same circular path and take photographs looking towards the horizon. The difference with this series is that I use a new technique while combining them: collage. Fragments of each photograph create the final image.
Before I was compressing time, now I am collecting fragments of it." Eeva Karhu
Eeva Karhu (born 1980, Kirkkonummi, Finland) studied photography at Helsinki's Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She uses nature and its seasonal passing as her guide to measure and translate our world by the power of its presence in our daily lives.
'When Eeva Karhu walks out of her front door some thirteen kilometres from the centre of Helsinki, she very much looks as if she intends to walk in a straight line. She takes a photograph and heads for the horizon. Her works are full of the horizon, each individual work is the amalgam of 86 different photographs, harvesting light from one moment to the next. The result is not just one place, but an emotional space which she travels through to find the beginning and ending of every day, a passage of time. After a while of looking at her photographs one starts seeing a single figure in the centre of the picture. It is coming to claim us rather like Omar Sharif in the scene where he slowly appears out of the desert in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Though there is an element of the same purity as in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, she is not pursuing the near perfect horizontal line of the sea or desert. Her feet are firmly on Finnish soil and the pictures trace her path to the horizon and back. If she lived in a desert or on the sea her method would only require two photographs, one at the point of departure and the other at the point she decreed the horizon, but the trees, houses, hillocks, bushes and other features of the landscape on her doorstop requires her to halt 86 times, and take another picture of another horizon.' (Alistair Hicks)