Heli Hiltunen, born 1960, is a highly acclaimed Finnish painter and photographer. Her foremost mark of distinction has always been dreamlike and melancholic atmospheres. Hiltunen creates a unique narrative tapestry inspired by everyday tales, of dialects and embroidery, dirty windows, and the bittersweet landscapes of her childhood memories. Her work is loaded with the organic language of nature, with its gnarled entanglements and trampled paths. Cinematic sequences of recollection and dream are created as one’s eye wanders between Hiltunen’s paintings and photographs. In the dimly smouldering images, reality is defragmented into a fertile soil for dreams. Hiltunen’s melancholic landscapes are stage curtains, not merely for her own fragments of memory, but for our own as well.
“In my work, I think the main theme is memory and oblivion. In order to remember and maintain a lived experience, we often carry a mental image of it. Subject matter for me is hovering between that experience and its image. Thus, memory and remembering is analogous with construction of an image.“
– Heli Hiltunen