Rose Rock / Prairie Flower

The work draws on personal material and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, to explore themes such as landscape photography and nature, the interconnectedness of haptic visuality and memory, and the embodied experience of feminine desire and the body.

Emilia Pennanen’s exhibition Rose Stone / Prairie Flower (2025) features photographic sculptures. The exhibition examines what makes up a landscape and how it could be presented in a new way. The works highlight the artist’s view of the connection between femininity and nature, which she sees as symbols in nature. The works were inspired by the poetry of the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), characterized by the symbolism between feminine sensuality and nature. The multi-material series of works explores the tension between seeing a landscape and the experience of being in the place.

The photographic sculptures are landscape images printed on silk fabrics. The images have been dyed with plants and printed using both digital and analog methods. The content of the photographs consists of details that make up a landscape, such as sandstones, rock formations and plants on the Atlantic coast, shells and fossils, and self-portraits with the landscape and its elements. Pennanen’s interest in multi-materiality in the creation of photographs has arisen from a desire to convey sensuality similar to that experienced when spending time in places. The images printed on textiles, the frames made of wood and the plaster cast sculptures refer to touch and forms found in nature, such as seashells, rock surfaces and caves as well as the ever-roaring ocean that shapes them.

Pennanen got the idea for the series when working in Portugal, near the Atlantic coast. The time spent in the area made her reflect more closely on her relationship with landscapes traditionally considered sublime, such as oceans and mountains. The details of these landscapes, such as plants and their blossoms, shells and the erosion of rock surfaces, become invisible and layered parts of nature. However, for Pennanen, they are at the core of the landscape, symbols of feminine sensuality. Shells are safe places, homes, mirrors that contain and conceal femininity. Red ocher earth pigment leads one beneath the earth’s surface, towards a different personal space, into a water-shaped stalactite cave. The photographs have been printed with natural materials, so the material structure of the photographs is based on the landscape, in a way forming its own self-portrait. Nature’s uncontrollability becomes part of the process: the outcome cannot be predetermined in nature’s endless continuum, which is ever-changing and always reborn.

Artist presentation
My name is Emilia Pennanen, and I am a Helsinki-based visual artist working in the extended realm of photography. My work draws on personal material and literature to explore themes such as landscape photography and nature, the interconnectedness of haptic visuality and memory, and the embodied experience of feminine desire and the body. Experimentation and methods that push the boundaries of photography are at the heart of my process. The final artworks often could be described as photographic sculptures. My works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Finland, Portugal, the United States of America and England.