Tiina Pyykkinen

Tiina Pyykkinen’s practice focuses on the exploration of bodily memory, non-verbal communication and the experience of temporality. She approaches these themes through e.g. philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and psychology, with a particular interest in how distortions of time and space are formed, and how emotions can be understood as embodied, spatial and relational phenomena.

In Pyykkinen’s work, affective experiences are not merely internal states but become integrated into memory systems and shape ways of relating to the surrounding environment. Her practice addresses these questions through the concept of visual disturbance; a bodily perceptual condition in which temporal continuity is interrupted, fragmented, or slowed. The paintings consist of multiple transparent pictorial layers applied onto mirrored metal surfaces. Materiality is central in Pyykkinen’s practice. The layered surfaces function like skin-like membranes that both conceal and reveal, through which the viewer perceives a shifting and blurred reflection of themselves. The image of the self does not appear unified or stable but emerges as fragmented and relational. Optical phenomena and pictorial structures disrupt habitual modes of seeing, shifting perception away from interpretation toward embodied experience. Pyykkinen’s visual language is defined by continuous movement. Through this material configuration the viewer simultaneously encounters several perceptual levels: the layered structure of the painting, their own reflection and the shifting reflections of their surroundings.