Rågskär is a modest, rocky island situated 15 kilometres off the coast of central Finland. Mostly red, but sometimes a faded yellow or green, a few small, wooden cottages are scattered along the shoreline bearing witness to human presence within a space where otherwise there is none. Most of the cottages are holiday homes for locals or for emigrants with roots in the area such as myself, but more often than not these huts stand empty.
No island is an ordinary place, and tinted by claustrophobia and the thrillingly exhausting sense of complete freedom as imposed by a nonnegotiable shoreline and the shadowy depth of the Baltic Sea, memories and perceptions that have been compiled over the years have come to form the spread of an invisible and impenetrable quilt that spans across the surface of this innocent land. Covering everything from the smallest pieces of moss and rock, to every sharp-pointed juniper, and the greenery assigned to each birch, this layer of pure appearance morphs them all into something else and something different: something uncanny and traumatic that screams out in silence.
The island is a place where real and unreal finally dissolves, a place that can only exist in imagination. The island can only be touched in pictures by circumventing the usual way of the camera, and each image in the series is consequently an interpretation and a recreation in miniature of a holiday photograph lifted from its carefully arranged space in the family album. Rather than being tied to the physical properties of the real world these images look to tease out the character and personality of a rather shy dot in the sea. The photographs make visible something akin to an introspect reality which nonetheless seems just as real.
