Until June 1st in Nunes Gallery, Satu Bethell is presenting the exhibition A Changing Picture, with painting and photography artworks, sponsored by Hämen taidetoimikunta and Hausjärven kunta.

A Changing Picture explores the ways by which memories once wrapped in emotions and under unrecognizable forms can receive a totally new form in a painting or a photograph. The passing of time sometimes affects human memories in such a way that memory layers form their own realities and stories, which can have nothing to do with the original experience in the end. Not only interpretation operates here, but also a kind of erosion and the personal emotional meaning of things, besides the way how one memory interacts with other memories and connects to them in order to form a significant whole.

Bethell thinks that the hues of the memory layers shape into memory chains, and it really happens like that with the different emotional colours or tonalities of human memories. Memories which are connected usually have the same emotional tonality or meaning. Emotions confer a personal meaning to diverse experiences, unite them in layers according to their “colour” and all these colours must interact harmoniously between them, like in a painting.

The reflections made by the artist on this topic also have something to do with the ways by which art and artistic forms of expression can be used to elaborate past experiences and create “differently coloured” memories, besides the more obvious differences in shape. To rethink one memory under a different point of view and with new materials can affect how that memory interacts with many more memories, and therefore lead to new thinking paths and whole new perspectives on a given experience or set of experiences, when not real behaviour changes. Artistic creation, or creation in general, is considered, mentally, one of the most advanced and complex forms of personal elaboration of experiences.

Satu Bethell (b. 1966) freely combines photography, painting and graphics in her works: she humorously states that “the process can be long and fairly slow and it can often include feelings of uncertainty and confusion”. Nevertheless, she finds the toleration of uncertainty “compelling and inspiring”: “To me, making art is as much about being able to contain an unknown feeling by giving boundaries to its uncertainty, as it is about giving form to the known”.

In this exhibition, she is presenting oils on canvases and pigment print photographs on the issues of memory storage, memory mutability, memory chains, the passing of time and seasons. Bethell has exhibited in the School of Art of the University of Wales and in many places more around Finland, including several Art Museums and Culture Houses, since 1991.

Galleria Nunes
Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu 17 A-a
00100 Helsinki
info@galleria-nunes.com
http://www.galleria-nunes.com
The gallery is located just on the other side of the street from Latsipalatsi, next door to AVA Design.

Opening Hours
Tue-Fri 11-17
Sat-Sun 12-16
Mondays Closed