Relational Painting, 2026, Moore Contemporary, Boorloo/Perth, Australia. Quilted aniline goat leather, galvanised steel.

Relational Painting begins with a precise act of return. In 2017, Mobile Composition reconvened a now-dispersed art collection through placeholders made in quilted black goat leather, restaging archival photographs and a historically specific choreography of installation. One of these proxies marked the absence of Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting No. 62 (1953), carrying forward only its title and scale.

Here Relational Painting No. 62 functions as a link between this earlier investigation of modernist interiors, collections and loss, and one in which ‘relational painting’ becomes an ongoing material practice. The work unfolds through assembly, bringing fragments into relation through alignment and misalignment, where meaning is contingent and produced through proximity.

rhythm without end

Rhythm Without End, 2021, Design Museum Helsinki, Finland. Gelatin silver prints (photograms); Aino Aalto, Bolgeblick (1932), pressed glass, manufactured by Iittala. An Index of Infinite Rotation, 2019-20, images from Design Museum Helsinki’s image archive, alongside the artist’s photographs of material in the archive and collection.

Rhythm Without End draws on the collection and image archives of Design Museum Helsinki, using ideas of circulation, rhythm and repetition to explore how objects might simultaneously inhabit our world and be a lens through which to view it. Circularity, as a formal and figurative concept, becomes evident across disciplines in forms that revolve, radiate, are rolled or turned. The installation follows this logic through a deep focus on a single design, Aino Aalto’s 1932 Bölgeblick glassware, influenced by concentric ripples that form on still water when disturbed. Produced in a centrifuge, its design echoes its making and the way liquid glass behaves when subjected to high-speed revolution and gravitational force. The photograms continue this engagement with circularity, translating the object into an image, its form dissolved and reconstituted as a photographic negative – an inversion of itself.

mobile composition

Mobile Composition, 2017–2020, Maison Louis Carré, France and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. Photo: Heikki Havas, 1962. Courtesy Alvar Aalto Museum

Mobile Composition is an installation and artist book that develop through one another, focusing on the interior of Alvar Aalto’s Maison Louis Carré and the art collection of Paris art dealer Louis Carré, for whom the house was built. Working from archival photographs that fix the collection at a specific moment in 1962, amidst a constant flow of paintings in and out of the house, the project examines its posthumous dispersal and attempts to reconvene it through other means. Acting as placeholders, eighteen key works were identified and remade in quilted black goat leather, retaining only the titles and dimensions of the originals, and installed and documented to restage the original photographs. The project unfolds across distinct but related forms including installation, exhibitions and an artist book.

eclipse sequence

Eclipse Sequence, 2019, HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Programme), Finland. Bookplates from Josef Sudek: The Commercial Photography of Družstevní Práce, HD video, mirrors, aniline goat leather.

Eclipse Sequence brings together a series of moments shaped by proximity, movement and perception. The installation incorporates a video projected into a circular cut through goat leather, floor-based mirrors that double and appear to move the gallery’s existing wind tunnels and a cut and collaged assembly of bookplates taken from Josef Sudek: The Commercial Photography of Druzstevni Prace.

equilux

Equilux, 2023–, 4k six-channel video installation
Cinematography: Candida Richardson. Filmed with permission of the National Trust and Alvar Aalto Foundation

Equilux draws Aino Aalto and Virginia Woolf into dialogue through the structure of a single day. Filmed at their former homes on equilux – the twice-yearly moment when day and night are exactly equal – the work forms a double portrait of two women, of two houses and of the same day, which occurs twice. Its six channels are drawn from the multiple perspectives of The Waves, in which Woolf imagined the lives of its six characters so interwoven that they continue each other. Tracing historical threads, object relationships and recurring forms, the work brings two distinct personal and creative legacies into unexpected proximity.