Words Mark Hooper Portraits by Meeri Koutaniemi

Published in No 15

Antti Laitinen creates images that make you rethink our relationship with nature — to question the everyday and look at the familiar anew. His series of “Broken Landscapes” present scenes of the forests and terrain that surround his rural home in southern Finland that are at once beautiful and unnerving. Perfect holes appear through a fir tree. The monotone colours of a line of birch trees are interrupted by an unexpected flash of autumnal foliage. The wildness of nature is contained within grids and forms too regular to have grown naturally. A tree appears to split apart, leaving a clear path through the middle of its branches. Another sways in the breeze on a perfectly still day. A fallen tree trunk glistens as the bark reveals itself to be made up of thousands of metal nails. Nothing is as it seems — or as it ought to be.

 At first, many of these artworks appear to be the result of digitally manipulated photographs, but there is no fakery here. Instead, they are often the result of months of physical work by Laitinen. His work combines elements of sculpture, installation and performance art, but he traces it all back to his beginnings as a photojournalist. “Everything started from there,” he says. “I am still thinking like a photographer, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I’m still building the image — and even when I’m working in nature or doing a performance, I’m thinking about how the image will look.”

In essence, much of Laitinen’s work is focused on capturing a single moment in time — albeit one that can take patience and painstaking preparation to capture. “Even if it is just a moment, I’m building it for a long time,” he explains. “And it is important what kind of background I have — I need some wood here and snow… things like that. So when I have all these pieces at the right angle, only then can I take the photo. And sometimes I have to wait half a year for that.”

It helps that Laitinen lives amongst his artworks, so that he can observe them from his home (a former school surrounded by woodland). “It’s nice that I can live with the works, and I can see them all the time, because then I can see … OK, now the snow is coming! And I’m ready.” This adds a fascinating, complex depth to his work — the capturing of a fleeting, transitory instant within a far longer process of construction, growth and decay. While most of us will only see the moment that the picture was taken, Laitinen can follow his creations over months, even years. “People can see it at that time, and it is ‘perfect’ — but more is happening after that. And I still follow them as they are disappearing…”

Does he ever return to “prune” his works before they are subsumed again by nature? “I’ll sometimes take a little bit back to make it visible, if it’s totally disappearing, but I kind of like that — how it’s ageing. It’s nice to follow, but it’s a little bit difficult to show it to an audience. Maybe if I make an installation I could but, at the moment, it’s mainly for a photo or a video. Maybe later I could show the whole thing.”

The apparent perfection of the images belies the physical work that goes into creating them. “I mostly use normal handheld gardening or woodland tools,” Laitinen explains. “They are much more precise than motor tools.” Sometimes he must make his own tools for the specific needs of an individual project, where his capacity for invention comes into its own. “Sometimes I make them from wood. I might also customize other tools or take parts from random objects and transform them into my own special tools.” Often, however, areas that appear to have been cut are the result of his bending branches back into the shape he needs and then tying them into place.

Despite the meticulous rearranging of nature that often occurs in his work, Laitinen still embraces his photographer’s impulsive instinct. “I remember once I was taking my daughter to kindergarten in the car and suddenly it was the right moment,” he laughs. “She was crying, ‘I want to go to kindergarten!’ And I was saying, ‘Yeah but I have to take one photo first! Just one photo!’ But also, sometimes you get the idea too late — like last week I had an idea for a winter image, but I was just losing the snow, so then you must wait one more year! Maybe it will happen next year?”

One question that many viewers have raised about Laitinen’s work is how he tallies his obvious sense of responsibility towards nature with the fact that his art often involves having to cut down or clear sections of woodland — does this weigh on him in any way? “Oh, look, the trees that I work with are mostly willows and others that are growing in a kind of wasteland on my ground, and I have to cut them anyway,” he clarifies. “The good thing with willows, when you cut one branch, quite quickly you get five more growing. And when I have any wood left over, I use it for heating my house or the sauna or whatever. It’s not like I am using any old valuable trees for my art.” So it’s almost like artistic woodland management? “Yeah! At the same time, I can do the farming and make some art!”

Just as intriguing is the way in which Laitinen’s work pays on our ideas of man’s relationship with nature. There is a long history of landscape painting in which artists would impose their idea of perfection on the natural world. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, wrote in his Discourses on Art about how one should strive to imitate the classical ideas of aesthetic beauty — which he defines, amongst other qualities, as revealing symmetry, unity and harmony. But nature is rarely symmetrical. Does Laitinen’s imposition of manmade symmetrical shapes echo this sense of controlling nature?

“Most of the time I’m thinking of this human relationship with nature,” he explains. “I’m originally from the countryside and at the moment I’m living in the countryside again, so nature is around me all the time. I think that’s how I started — after school I didn’t have a studio or anything, so it was quite natural for me to go into the forest — I was using it almost like a big studio; there were lots of materials, and space and light. I think nature is so near to me, I don’t think in terms of showing a perfect idea of nature. But I’m using nature…”

And there is another subtle difference between this living approach to art and that of classical idealism. “Man’s relationship with nature is one element of my work. I try to play these ideas, with a little bit of controlling, but often when I make work with nature, it takes control again — so my work starts disappearing. Because trees start growing new branches and after a while you can’t even see what I’ve done.”

There seems something particularly, uniquely Finnish about his outlook, I suggest. “Well, for me that’s difficult to answer — I think you have to say! But of course, you can see Finnish nature in my works!” From an outsider’s perspective, there is an affinity with the natural world that sits comfortably in the Finnish psyche — life near the Arctic Circle involves perseverance and an understanding of the struggle of nature and the changing of the seasons. This is something that those of us living in the industrialized cities of the West had a glimpse of in recent years thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, with lockdowns forcing people to explore their local environment, seeing it through fresh eyes, whilst we witnessed the rewilding of urban spaces, from Venice to Dubai. In Finland, however, the effect was less noticeable — largely because the dividing line between nature is less obvious. “I hardly see anyone anyway — except going to the shop once a week!” says Laitinen. “Finnish people tend to spend a lot of time in the countryside, even those from the city have a summer house, because we only have five million people here, so there’s a lot of land, there’s more space for people.” The winter months also have their advantages in Laitinen’s line of work. “It’s good as a photographer, because the snow reflects more light!”

A more obvious sense of man’s imposition on nature can be seen in Laitinen’s Nail Trunk series, in which metal nails are hammered into a fallen tree — something which developed into a collaborative, almost ritualistic project.

“To begin with, I just did it myself,” he says. “I liked the effect that the wood becomes metal — after a while you can’t see the wood because it becomes covered with nails. But it’s nice that everybody can do it — I thought, why not ask people to join? I like it that you’re working better with people — it’s work that everybody can do, we’ve had people ranging from 2 years old to over 90. It only takes 30 seconds to understand — people come and think, OK, maybe I’ll hit one or two nails… and they end up staying for half an hour, and then come back the next day with their families!”

The result is reminiscent of various “offering” trees found around the world — such as the St Maelrubha Oak on the shores of Loch Maree, in Scotland, which is festooned with coins hammered into the bark as votive gifts to the local saint, who was believed to have had healing powers. “I only heard about these rituals after I started the project,” admits Laitinen. “But it is a little like religion, it’s a repetitive action where you can empty your mind — it’s therapeutic.”

By enshrining and immortalizing it, Laitinen achieves something that is true of all his work — imbuing it with a transformative power, whereby the familiar and everyday is presented to us in new and surprising ways. We are used to seeing the scenes depicted in his images, but thanks to subtle interventions, he prompts us to rethink what we might otherwise take for granted; to look at the natural world that surrounds us and consider it in a new light.

 Learn more at anttilaitinen.com

Mark Hooper is an award-winning editor and writer. His book, The Great British Tree Biography is published by Pavilion. mark-hooper.com and @markhooper

Photographer Meeri Koutaniemi is based in Finland koutaphotos.com