Päiväläinen makes a site-specific installation in nature by placing old clothes purchased in a flea market and used cloth and take a photograph of them. Her works are filled with tricks which attract the viewers to remind of something.

The old clothes used in the shooting depict the sense of loss that they are worn by nobody any more and at the same time the accumulation of time during which somebody had worn them. They therefore function as a metaphor for something invisible surfacing in front of us such as life and death, and presence of absence.

Päiväläinen elaborately chooses a stage for the shooting, not only relying on the sense of the sight, but it must be a place where the garment becomes a part of nature. Moreover, she can commit herself into the image there and can create a space where everything related is mutually resonant in the end.

She presents that there was a person or a history that were lost. For that, she finds out the things which disappeared between the past and present, meaning their vestiges of the unseen now, and then locates them in the place they should exist. Through them we recognize absence of things which do not exist any more. 

In River Notes series exhibited, which is Päiväläinen’s new works, she entwined cloths with trees in several layers in landscape, as if the trees are dressed, and took their reflection on the river or lake to compose a new image of her work. There, her strong approach for the fundamental question toward presence and absence can be observed.

The exhibition is the first solo show of Riitta Päiväläinen in Japan.