The Turku Art Museum is devoting a major exhibition to Nelli Palomäki with Holds, a monograph that brings together three recent series (Shared, Speed of Dark, and The Ladder) and reveals a body of photographic portraits unfolding narratives where community, kinship, and refuge intertwine.
Photographic artist Nelli Palomäki is known both in Finland and internationally for her magically timeless and moving portraits. At the core of her work are the relationships we have to those similar to us, themes of family or family-like community, and the human need to build and offer physical, psychological and spiritual shelter. In recent years, Palomäki has shifted from portraits of children and adolescents to photographs of adults, always maintaining the sensitive interaction between photographer and subject. Her works invite the viewer to question what a portrait can ultimately reveal about its sitter, and to what extent the image is both staged by the artist and, perhaps, a portrait of the photographer herself.
Palomäki is deeply engaged with the process of analog photography and its connection to the annual cycle and to darkness. She currently works with a large-format film camera and produces gelatin silver prints using traditional darkroom techniques. The work requires patience, as each step must be carried out with care. The artist describes herself as someone oscillating between chaos and control, sustaining an obsessive relationship with photography.
Three of Palomäki’s series are on view at the Turku Art Museum. Shared (2016–2024) explores siblinghood, a bond shaped by both apparent similarities and profound differences: in these images, brothers and sisters cling to and hold one another, sharing an identity forged as much by closeness as by separation. Speed of Dark (2020–2024) emerged from a time of retreat, marked by home, family, and the darkroom, in response to global constraints. The series depicts children growing up and the annual cycle of the garden, while also probing the very essence of photography: the presence and absence of light, and the medium’s power to preserve and shape our memories.
The most recent series, The Ladder (2024–), is presented for the first time at the Turku Art Museum. Photographed at the Valamo Monastery in Heinävesi, Palomäki continues her exploration of themes of safety and refuge. The works are rooted in the everyday life of the modern monastery and its brotherhood, whose age structure has become younger in recent years. The photographs draw inspiration from monastic tradition, from icons, and from narratives and texts that gradually revealed themselves through the artist’s repeated visits to the monastery. The Ladder refers not only to the eponymous work by Saint John Climacus from the year 600, which describes thirty steps of spiritual development, but also more broadly to the human need to grow and progress toward a defined goal.
