Santeri Tuori has developed for his portraits and landscapes a special technique where moving video images and photographed still images are combined. His most recent series of works, Forest (2009), consists of several large-scale projections with integrated photographs and videos. The videos are projected directly on the wall, overlapping the photographed still image or installed as backside projection, thus hiding the technical equipment.

Tuori collected material for Forest during three years on a remote island in the Finnish archipelago called Kökar. The island has a very distinctive character, with stunted trees, dense bushes, rocky shores, and, surrounding everything, the wide, open sea. However, Tuori is not interested in depicting all of the natural elements of this landscape. His focus is on the island’s forests, which do not correspond with the typical idea of a Finnish forest. There are no traces of human presence and forest management. In Tuori’s forests, trees grow wild in tangled thickets.

While working with this series, Tuori marked the spot of the camera with a stone or a stick in order to be able to return to the same place in the woods, sometimes after a long interval. Many times he also drew a map of the site. The Forest installations are titled according to the special characteristics of each filmed or photographed spot, with its colour, its light or the chosen view: Forest (Canopy), Forest (Grey), Forest (Reddish), Forest (Panorama), Forest (Lush), Forest (Tree and Pond).

The scale of projections is larger than human size: for instance, the images in the installation Forest (Reddish) are 3.3 x 5.9 metres and 3 x 4 metres. Due to the large screen size, the encounter between the work and the spectator is a physical one, especially when the viewer is standing between two images projected on opposite walls. In this work, Tuori is creating several spaces. The first one is the forest itself, the subject matter, presented as moving images with a sense of three-dimensionality. The second space is formed by the installation. We are situated literally in the middle of the work, not only looking at the images but also being able to walk around the space and listen to the sounds of the forest. This multichannel soundscape actually creates the third space. In the end, the forest becomes something we can experience in a multi-sensory way.

For the Forest installations, Tuori worked at the same location in different seasons and weather conditions. He captured the passing of time through the forest, which is constantly changing: the lights, the colours, the movements of the trees, bushes, branches, water and ice. This is a real drama, a mystery, including also a sense of fear and threat. Yet at the same time nature reveals itself to be powerful and beautiful. Placed in the middle of this natural drama, the spectator is not able to see the horizon – only the glimpses of light in the vegetation indicate the space beyond the woods. The work has a connection to the tradition of romantic landscape painting and photography – only the ruins are missing.

Tuori’s work is about different times. First of all, there is the time that is related to the used media: photography captures an instant in front of the camera lens, with its certain time and light conditions, whereas video is composed of motion and duration. And then there is the time of nature itself – the repetition of the seasons, the cycle of day and night. Finally, there is the spectator’s own time, a subjective experience that is immersive and meditative. The method of combining two media creates complex layers of different times in his work. Santeri Tuori is conceptualizing time and space through the forest.