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British Journal of Photography D
N
EXHIBITIONS, NEW TALENT, PORTRAIT
Published on 16 June 2015
Delicate Demons: do women belong in the home?
Written by Clare Gallagher
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Woman Washing Herself
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Woman on Balcony
All images from the series Delicate Demons © Satu Haavisto and Aino Kannisto, courtesy Red Barn Gallery
A new collaborative series from two Finnish photographers transgresses
traditional notions of women belonging in the home.
Delicate Demons is a collaborative, ongoing project between Finnish photographers
Satu Haavisto and Aino Kannisto, in which women are meticulously staged in
domestic spaces.
The spaces in the photographs are tight, with a room corner in most of the scenes,
compressing the viewer and the subject into an uncomfortably proximal relationship
and emphasising the sense of home as a potentially oppressive place.
The women appear as mysterious characters, deep in thought. They feel heavy and
complicated, physically embodying difficult emotions and experiences.
The gaze of many of the women is strikingly intense. In one image, Woman on
Balcony, her stare out of the frame feels somewhat over-constructed until, with a jolt,
we see in a reflection she is in fact gazing directly at the camera.
Woman and Pillows
Face on, her look is more vulnerable, more anxious and raw. Props and settings
combine to hint at troubling, ambiguous backstories: one figure clutches a kitchen
knife, barely visible between her knees.
Delicate Demons comes from the same vein as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The
Yellow Wallpaper, in which the apparently innocuous wallpaper becomes a metaphor
for woman’s confinement in the home.
Haavisto, who was born in 1975, and Kannisto, born 1973, make work which feels less
theatrical, expansive and allegorical than their contemporary Gregory Crewdson, the
American photographer known for his elaborately staged scenes of American homes.
This work eschews the cinematic feel of Crewdson’s imagery, evoking instead a
feeling of disturbing intimacy.
Both artists graduated from the prominent Helsinki School at Alvar Aalto University,
a department which also produced their contemporary Elina Brotherus. Alvar Aalto’s
photographers are known for their cool, careful style and frequent use of the figure
to embody experience in the landscape.
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Haavisto and Kannisto find the process of collaborative working an opportunity to
confront and negotiate their intuitive, unchallenged methods of practice.
While they share the development of ideas in the project, they have demarcated
roles in the realisation of the work, with Kannisto designing each set and Haavisto
directing the model. They were drawn to these scenes of women washing
themselves, doing dishes, perched uneasily or lost in anxious thought, saying they
felt these experiences were rarely represented, perhaps because they were seen as
“too private, in an embarrassing or banal way”.
Delicate Demons serves to contradict the facile notion of home as tranquil haven and
as a naturally feminine space.
The overall sense of the series is of the unheimlich, the uncanny or unhomely, in
which the familiar contains aspects which are both known and strange, comforting
and frightening.
Delicate Demons, by Satu Haavisto and Aino Kannisto, is on show at the Red Barn Gallery,
43B Rosemary Street, Belfast until 28 June. Open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10-5pm, as part
of Belfast Photo Festival.
FILED UNDER: Exhibitions, New Talent, Portrait
TAGGED WITH: Aino Kannisto, clare gallagher, delicate demons, feminist photography, frontpagefeature,
Satu Haavisto
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