Sofia Okkonen’s project Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour, consisting of staged photographs, presents an anonymous, fully painted nude female figure. Isolated within a photographic studio, the woman is positioned against simple, saturated fields of colour as well as technical surfaces and equipment. The body appears heavy, often reclined and passive. When active, the figure’s actions are directed towards herself, performed for her own sake, or focused on posing.

Within the project, decorative buttercream cakes, frames, a quad bike, knives, snakes, a drone and a massage chair also play their own roles. Through these elements, Okkonen explores the interrelations between desire, superficiality, aggression and melancholy.

The works in the project are based on an interest in capturing a figure trapped within itself, yet blind to its own shadows, and the dim atmosphere it produces. The project is underpinned by reflections on the alternation between superficial self-sufficiency and self-loathing vulnerability. The friction and close oscillation between these two opposing forces appear as a way of being in the world, as physical sensations and as a condition: lovelessness arising from a hunger for love.

ROSE — Rose by Sofia Okkonen is a photographic foreplay and profile of a woman. It presents a woman isolated in a studio, posing for a camera. The model is like an amateur actor, who gets the script just as she arrives in front of the casting directors.

The tension in the photographs is born from the discrepancy between the physical presence and the emotional absence of the model. The woman is simultaneously inviting and rejecting the gaze.

The works pose sensitive questions about how the need to be seen correlates with the need to hide, how lust correlates with fear, the natural with the artificial or the banal with the sublime. How does a woman perform femininity, and to what consequences?

SUGARTRAP — Joint exhibition and ongoing project with sculptor Kristiina Sedlerova Villanen.
(Sofia Okkonen and sculptor Kristina Sedlerova Villanen address Sinne gallery with a site-specific approach. SUGARTRAP is an exhibition, a visual conversation and an artistic collaboration where tension is formed between the large-format photographic prints and heavy sculptures spread across the space. The encounter of photographs and sculptures creates an entity which deconstructs and comments on romantic love and, above all, the time-bound nature and experience of this sweet dream-wired relationship, with its weak points and the suffocating ideological and structural models around it. The materials of the works in the exhibition, such as stone, metal, paper, toffee and a bit of salt can be seen as gentle nods and gestures towards love or as an irony on the theme.)

Honey, Please and Loving Compassion.
In dialogue about Honey, Please with curator-researcher Anna Jensen. Translation: Roosa Tulvio Graphic Design: Tino Nyman

REEA WINTER Model: Anni Hintsanen - Brand Model Management.

FISKARS BY MARIA KORKEILA — modelled on Max Kallio @kallionmax

Taped on the skin — Defining sensuality through menswear. Collection photos for designer Emilia Kuurila.

HETA VAJAVAARA LOOKBOOK — "Everyday aesthetics guide us to appreciate things as they are. We can celebrate the distinctive attributes of something, and thus be more ecological and sustainable in our actions. It shows us how much responsibility, power and opportunity designers really have to change our lives. It also makes the tremendous power of aesthetics clearly visible. The quality of life and state of the world can be improved and even determined by aesthetic concerns.⁠"

Heta Vajavaara.

2020 ON GOING — Digital paintings