Maija Annikki Savolainen’s exhibition at Hippolyte presents us with the properties of light and the relationship they have with photography. It contains photographs and a plant physiological experiment, where seedlings of Fuchsia gotenborg are exposed to three different light treatments.
Maija Annikki Savolainen is interested in photographic expression defined by sunlight. Her works bring forth the question of the “language of light”; does it exist and how can it be made visible through photography. “I shoot portraits, still life and landscapes. I try to seize a moment, where sunlight becomes an active agent in my photographs. The aim of my images is to express light in such a particular way that the subject becomes secondary to the viewer and the substance of light becomes the focal point,” the artist explains.
The plant installation, present in the exhibition alongside the photographs, addresses the effects of light on a living subject. The quantity and quality of sunlight determine the shape and color of a plant in the same way that light determines what becomes visible in a photograph. The plant growth experiment will show the effects different wavebands of light have on the development of the Fuchsia seedlings. The audience can also take part in verifying the results in a workshop during the last day of the exhibition (Sun 28 Feb 2016, 12noon–4p.m.). During the day, the viewers can, under the guidance of researchers from the University of Helsinki, photograph with a thermographic camera and measure the anthocyanin concentrations in the plant tissue.
