Sari Palosaari Maps Lichen onto Images of the Earliest Galaxies

Forum Box Presents Sari Palosaari’s Substrate in Helsinki

Forum Box presented Sari Palosaari's Substrate in Helsinki, on view from September 4 through September 27, 2026.

Sari Palosaari's Substrate was on view at Forum Box in Helsinki from September 4 to September 27, 2026, across the gallery's Permanto hall and its Parvi space.

The central work, Cosmic Intimacy, placed aluminium and brass casts of rosette lichens on solar panels, composed according to recent NASA images of the earliest and most distant galaxies.

The starting point was solar panel maintenance websites showing lichen colonising the panels; the lichens Palosaari cast were collected from building foundations, water channel walls and air conditioning units.

Grounding, built directly on site, combined gabion baskets with metal fragments taken from city skips, while Solar Enfold gathered folded brass around a desk-like work based on conversations with solar physicists. Below, in her own text, Palosaari explains why she calls this way of working grazing.

"Distinct yet momentarily connected, they continue as reconnected, transformed fields."

Substrate is an underlying base layer, a nourishing and carrying platform, a surface of life that both enables things and gives birth to the new. It is a foundation that serves both as a medium and a site for events.

The exhibition unfolds through the concept by exploring different substrates and the exchange between entities. The sculptural works consist of open-ended spatial ensembles as well as those that have crystallized into more independent forms.

Palosaari thinks of her practice as laiduntaminen (Finnish), grazing. It is foraging for food for both body and mind. It can be both a leisurely and a painful act of loitering and lingering. It is not simply drifting from one place to another, but confronting life as it comes. For this exhibition, she grazed in her immediate surroundings as well as in the field of solar physics.

Cosmic Intimacy is on view in the Permanto hall of the gallery. It consists of solar panels with aluminum and brass castings. The work took its departure from images found on solar panel maintenance websites, where lichens could be seen colonizing the panels.

For the work, Palosaari collected rosette lichens from building foundations, the walls of water channels, and the surfaces of air conditioning units. The casts are composed on the panels according to the spatial arrangements found in recent NASA images of the earliest and most distant galaxies.

With Grounding, Palosaari worked directly on site forming a constellation on the floor of the former earth floor storage space now serving as the exhibition venue. The open-ended installation consists of gabion baskets and found metal fragments collected from skips around the city.

She calls the sculptural modules of the installation "placentas." They do not represent a placenta but function like one. Gabions, or stone baskets, are porous architectural structures, simultaneously permeable, protective, and damming. They allow liquids and nutrients to pass through, but protect from erosion and other harmful forces.

As sculptural modules, they attach temporarily to the floor of the gallery with the found objects sticking to their walls through temporary bindings. The elements of the installation exist in a breathing interaction with one another and in relation to their environment, while retaining their distinct, recognizable separateness.

Solar Enfold, seen in the Parvi space, is an ensemble of folded and bent brass forms. At the center of the ensemble is the work Solar physicist feeding the sculptor, which is based on conversations with solar physicists. Resting on the desk-like structure are recollections of desktop materials, as well as a model of a solar flux rope.

A flux rope is a twisting structure formed by magnetic field lines that stores energy. A single field line can break only when driven into close proximity to another differently directed field line, at which point they simultaneously break and reconnect. For a brief moment, two different magnetic fields become dynamically connected, releasing energy before separating once again. Distinct yet momentarily connected, they continue as reconnected, transformed fields.

Sari Palosaari is a sculptor and laiduntaja, a grazer. In her northern substrate, a river dam, an ore mine, a cellulose boiler, and a steel mill were part of the same backyard with a cloudberry swamp, groundwater spring, crystal snowdrift, and a hanging orange midnight sun. They share the same field, they feed from the same pasture. In her artistic practice, Palosaari cultivates a culture of difference, creating spaces of exchange in-between separateness and entanglement.

Palosaari´s works have been recently shown at curated venues such as Solastalgia, the Art Ii Biennale as part of the Oulu26 program, Synzoochory, the Department of Geosciences at the University of Helsinki, Sunkissed Loiter, Hakaniemenranta 26 Työhuone and Same Sea, Helsinki Biennial. Her sculptures are included in the collections of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the EMMA Museum of Modern Art.

The realization of the exhibition and artistic work has been supported by Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Text: Sari Palosaari