IDA TAAVITSAINEN

IDA

TAAVITSAINEN

Covid Flowers
2020
Cyanotypes painted with watercolour, various sizes

These images would most likely not exist without the Covid crisis. During the first lock-down, I bought more flowers than ever before to create more beauty for mylself in my daily life. As my living environment shrunk and life slowed down, I started to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the everyday. Simultaneously time my need to create by hand grew, but because of the restrictions (and being home with a 2-year-old) I could not work as usual. The flowers I bought were an answer to my frustration and my hunger for beauty.

These pictures are both photographs and paintings. They are cyanotypes, one of the earliest methods of photographic printing, that I have painted upon. The cyanotype is a simple contact printing method, that requires only two chemicals, ferric ammonium citrate and potassium  ferricyanide, and water. The image deveops in sunlight and is fixed with water, so this method was perfect for me when I was working from home and caring for my child.
To only make flower images was not creative enough for me, so once the cyanotypes had dried, I started to tone the the life-sized flower images with watercolours. I had not painted or drawn actively since high-school and it was a fun process to revive my forgotten painting skills. The images combine the joy of making things by hand with my appreciation for beauty. The work is a homage to my grandmother, who had passed away from alzheimer’s the year before, and who to the end enjoyed the beauty of flowers. I hope that I can create beauty for others with this work.

The series was shown in the exhibtion Blombilder at the pop-up space in the Hambergska Summer Exhibition in Loviisa in the summer of 2020. Individual images have also been shown at Kosminen Salonki (Helsinki, 2020), Helen20 (Helsinki, 2020) and the Helsinki Darkroom Festival (2022).