Erkkola's new exhibition On the edge of the blade

Kreetta Järvenpää’s (b. 1974) painterly flower photographs exude a dreamlike atmosphere and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. They refer to the tradition of 17th-century Dutch flower painting. As early botany developed, artists depicted flowers with a precision that enabled detailed species identification. In symbolically rich still lifes, living and wilting plants also served as reminders of the transience of life and the passage of time.

Flowers became Järvenpää’s language of expression following a personal loss, the death of his mother, who was a keen gardener. He sees the theme of the exhibition as a continuum in which different eras meet.

– Flowers have always been part of this world. They have also been a subject of visual art for centuries, but each artist approaches them from their own perspective.

Järvenpää is particularly interested in the aesthetics of imperfection, such as the beauty of abnormal, damaged or dead flowers. For Erkkola’s exhibition, he has also created site-specific dried plant installations.

Terhi Heino (born 1970) creates art from delicate recycled and natural materials, such as dried plants and fish scales. She has made collages from plants in old school herbariums, dismantling and rearranging their pressed leaves and flowers into new forms. Heino’s works encourage us to reflect on our relationship with nature. She has halted the natural cycle of already dead plants and animal remains by collecting and preserving them in her works, but even Heino’s works, constructed from organic materials, have a limited lifespan.

“I have always been interested in slow, hands-on work based on the properties of materials, research and conceptual work,” says Heino.

In my works, I deal with the transience and fragility of the environment and the individual, but also with personal pain points. In my balance exercise collages, I have dealt with the grief caused by my father’s death.

The exhibition also features illustrations from Ebba Masalin’s (1873–1942) teaching materials, which are part of the Tuusula Art Museum’s collections and depict the local nature in a systematic and objective manner. Masalin mastered a clear, purely visual narrative style, which was particularly evident in her teaching charts. The use of educational picture charts became widespread in public schools at the end of the 19th century, and they served as important visual aids alongside textbooks until at least the 1960s.

The historical perspective is deepened by Hilda Olson’s (1832–1915) watercolour paintings of spiders from the collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History. These detailed species studies were produced between 1859 and 1862 during expeditions led by Alexander von Nordmann, Professor of Zoology and Botany. Olson was a pioneer in natural science illustration. She worked with great precision at a time when the distribution of plant and animal species was being mapped more and more systematically, while at the same time an understanding of the vulnerability of nature and the impermanence of species was beginning to take hold.

As a whole, the exhibition approaches the fragility of life through different eras and perspectives. Straddling the line between the public and the private, the works examine how people strive to understand and structure their changing environment and to cope with experiences of loss.

With a
sharp blade Kreetta Järvenpää | Terhi Heino | Hilda Olson | Ebba Masalin
14 January–26 April 2026

Erkkola
Rantatie 25, Tuusula

Open
Wed–Sun 12 noon–5 p.m.

Admission
fees €10/€8/€0 Free
with Museum Card and Kaiku Card

Further information

This content has been translated using AI