ELINA MERENMIES: Heavenly Host

Elina Merenmies has been in charge of gardening the common yards and terraces at her residence building – the renowned Lallukka Artist’s Home, which provides homes and studios for altogether 56 artists.

 

She has transformed the shared yard into a lush garden with all sorts of flowers blooming at different pace during the warmer seasons, attracting bees, butterflies, and birds.

 

Verdant leaves and gardener figures find their way also to Elina’s artworks, where a lone gardener is never really alone, but in the happy company of their plants, birds and other creatures.

To Elina Merenmies, her paintings have a life and a will of their own – they are a living body, they breathe and move.

The surroundings depicted in her works are often places Elina repeatedly returns to. These locations have no exact timeline, but they sometimes find a counterpart in reality: Elina Merenmies has described arriving to a place completely new to her, and suddenly recognizing it as familiar, as scenery from her own paintings. 

"Painting to me is a certain way of being – of existing in the world.  It's a way of traveling to places and meeting all these fascinating characters without taking the physical journey."