With Capsules, Luxembourg Art Week takes over vacant spaces, store windows, and façades in the city center. Each activated space will be visible from the street around the clock.
Caspules benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Elsa Salonen
The Heavenly Wooded Area
Location
Quintet Private Bank,
2 display windows
Grand-Rue, L-1661 Luxembourg
Art Walk Challenge
With the kind support of Quintet Private Bank
For Capsules 2025 Salonen presents works from two different series. The series Plants, Healers: Deep Sleep consists of sleep-inducing medicinal plants that the artist collected over the course of two summers in her home region, the Turku archipelago, and around her studio in Berlin. The artist extracted colours from the herbs leaving them pale and colourless. The distilled colour pigments were then conserved in transparent isomalt and displayed in laboratory glass vessels alongside the now-white, pressed plants. Healers have relied on herbs for centuries. In the Finnish tradition of tietäjät (seers/healers), the knowledge of the required medicinal plant was often obtained from a sprite during sleep.
The second series shows fragments of trees and animal bones collected from the Finnish forests and colours distilled or ground from them. In Finnish nature worship, many old, large or oddly shaped trees were considered sacred. They were thought to act as mediators between this world and the afterlife. Sacred trees were believed to be connected to the spirits of both lost loved ones and hunted animals. The series Heavenly Wooded Area marks the artist’s first note – a kind of colour study – into this vast subject.
Plants, Healers: Deep Sleep
sleep-inducing medicinal plants collected from Finland and Germany, colour pigments and medicinal substances distilled from the plants, isomalt, glass, metal
2023–2024, various dimensions (glass sheets á 60×25 cm)
Heavenly Wooded Area (Coloursheds I-II)
fragments of trees and animal bones collected from the Finnish forests, colours distilled or ground from them, glass, metal
2024, various dimensions
Elsa Salonen’s (b.1984, Turku, Finland) oeuvre is marked by the artistic interpretation of alchemy and Finnish nature worship. Salonen prepares the pigments for her paintings and installations by extracting colours from plants and grinding a wide variety of raw materials, such as animal bones, meteorites and seashells. Salonen thinks that each of the materials stores a special knowledge and that the ‘experiences’ of the pigments define the conceptual message of each work.
Interview of Elsa Salonen
Discover the ART WALK by downloading the map here.
