Travelling through the landscape at modern speeds can produce different sensations and visions depending where you are. Through photography one can attempt to capture this tangible world - documenting can prove to be a slippery but poetic encounter. ONERVA UTRIAINEN meditates on this subject within her new series of photographic works of the Australian landscape, taken at high speed as she travelled through rural Australia. The significant blur, specific to photography, denotes movement and change – indeed the title Pastoral Passages speaks of a moving through temporary spaces, as passage is never static but a transition between states, places and points.
Our relationship to the land is questioned here, as well as to our past, as we traffic along a freeway behind semi-solid barriers. In earlier times, when roads and paths more closely followed the natural landscape, we were part of the whole and we were informed by this view. ONERVA UTRIAINEN presents a gesture, a rush of a memory, and an expanse populated by faint and misty spectres. Once familiar rural signifiers of previous connections, times and livelihoods are rendered transparent, vague and distant. As the lens captures less it can in turn reveal much more.
Born in Finland, ONERVA UTRIAINEN trained in Italy and has been exhibiting professionally since 1993 in Europe and more recently in Australia. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections nationally and abroad, and is on the board of many art foundations in her homeland.
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