The Heavenly Wooded Area

Location

Quintet Private Bank, 2 display windows, Grand-Rue, L-1661 Luxembourg

With the kind support of Quintet Private Bank

With Capsules, Luxembourg Art Week takes over vacant spaces, store windows, and façades in the city center. Each activated space will be visible from the street around the clock. For Capsules 2025, Elsa Salonen presents works from two different series.

The series Plants, Healers: Deep Sleep consists of sleep-inducing medicinal plants that the artist collected over the course of two summers in her home region, the Turku archipelago, and around her studio in Berlin. The artist extracted colours from the herbs leaving them pale and colourless. The distilled colour pigments were then conserved in transparent isomalt and displayed in laboratory glass vessels alongside the now-white, pressed plants. Healers have relied on herbs for centuries. In the Finnish tradition of tietäjät (seers/healers), the knowledge of the required medicinal plant was often obtained from a sprite during sleep. 

The second series shows fragments of trees and animal bones collected from the Finnish forests and colours distilled or ground from them. In Finnish nature worship, many old, large or oddly shaped trees were considered sacred. They were thought to act as mediators between this world and the afterlife. Sacred trees were believed to be connected to the spirits of both lost loved ones and hunted animals. The series Heavenly Wooded Area marks the artist’s first note – a kind of colour study – into this vast subject.