Kreetta Järvenpää Finnish, b. 1974
Kreetta Järvenpää skillfully arranges vibrant floral arrangements informed by the colors, textures and shapes of various plants and photographs them. The characteristics of different flowering phases, such as buds blooming and wilting, come together to perform a symphony about the passage of time, life and death.
Everything begins with flowers for artist Kreetta Järvenpää (b. 1974, Finland). cFollowing this narrativity, the work Seahorses and Mermaids (2022) carries with it a background story of how the artist found an old seahorse carcass in an antique store. She was mesmerized and haunted by its existence and how it had once been alive but was now preserved as an object. The delicacy of the creature and its status as an endangered species became the source of inspiration for the work. In the lower half of the composition, leaves and broken flowers lay scattered across the base, while a contrast of various purple flowers and yellow branches reach upward striving for life; a symbol of hope planted by the life of a seahorse.
Kreetta Järvenpää is a Helsinki-based artist who specializes in photographing flowers and plants, creating contemporary floral fantasies inspired by the Dutch golden age. She has an MA degree from the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. Järvenpää has been exhibiting her photographs since 2017 and she has been featured in publications such as Rum Ute, Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, Asun magazine and Orlando magazine.
Learning to speak the language of flowers.
Flowers are my materials; they are expressive and shaped by time. Since 2016, I have been making floral arrangements and photographing them to capture every detail into a frame. Everything must be perfect before taking the final shot and I want that my photography doesn’t look like a photograph at all. I create an escape window from reality with my camera – a floral fantasy.
When I was in my twenties, I swore I would never work with plants or gardens. I identified flowers and plants with my mother – they were her. When she died 20 years later, I felt a need to work with flowers and abstract painting. Suddenly the door was open to me and I understood what I had inherited. Flowers were left for me to build my own connection to making art.
I love my freedom to create the world I want; reality and time have no meaning to me. I find my meditative space through the beauty of changing and decaying flowers, and in my works they last forever. I choose my flowers carefully and try to work as ecologically as I can. I paint my own backdrops and I construct arrangements at my workspace where I have an orange tree. This tree was grown by my mother from a single orange seed. She bought the orange from the grocery store in 1965.
Now I’m on a journey with my own language of flowers.
