Elsa Salonen's solo exhibition at Jochen Hempel Galerie in Leipzig.

Elsa Salonen: Moonlit Botanical Colour Theories
10 January - 28 February, 2026
Jochen Hempel Galerie, Leipzig

My solo exhibition 'Moonlit Botanical Colour Theories', explores flowers and plants from a broad cultural, scientific, and esoteric perspective; it brings together alchemy, Finnish nature worship, still-life paintings, botanical collections, medicinal plants, herbal spells, plant intelligence, and spagyrics. The works reflect on the power of all plants to connect this reality to other metaphysical levels.

Many of the works are guided by a technique I developed a decade ago, in which I distil colours from flowers, leaving them pale and colourless. I conserve the extracted colour pigments in laboratory glass vessels, displaying them alongside the white plants.
Withering flowers lose their colours in death; as if the life itself were hidden in the colours. In traditional still-life paintings, the painted colours of blossoms captured a moment in time and 'defeated' death. In Still Life with Flowers, I reinterpret this tradition by poetically separating the vivid life energy (the preserved colour) from its empty, pale body (the decoloured flower). Also, Spirit Collections, named after the botanical collections, refers to this separation.

The series Plants, Healers: Deep Sleep consists of sleep-inducing medicinal plants that I collected in my home region, the Turku archipelago, and around my studio in Berlin (chamomile, raspberry, meadowsweet, valerian, small-leaved linden, field horsetail, imperforate St John's-wort, common St John's wort, rosebay willowherb, common hop). Suffering from insomnia from time to time, I feel grateful to these plants for many well- slept nights. 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. An imaginative idea of interspecies communication through dreams is glimpsed in the exhibition.

For the works, I researched old beliefs surrounding plants. Pagan Promise of Spring features similar flower wreaths that were used in pagan rituals across Europe. In Nordic and Germanic cultures, wreaths celebrated the changing seasons and honoured the return of the sun in spring. Delphinium Spell recalls European protection spells. According to a medieval myth, delphiniums sprouted where knights wiped their swords after slaying a dragon – the creature’s blood and venom giving rise to the beautiful yet poisonous flower. The dragons in the Lullaby paintings are gentler; borrowed from alchemical illustrations, they combine bird and reptile features and represent the union of this and the otherworldly, the heavenly and the earthly, or the journey between them. The sleep- inducing medicinal plants act as similar travelling companions between sleep and wakefulness.

For the past decade, I have painted exclusively with natural pigments, which define the conceptual message of each work. This time, the paintings are made with colours ground from stones and meteorites, extracted from plants, or created by burning bird and reptile parts found in the forests. Medieval alchemists prepared pigments for artists and, through natural materials, sought to understand the universe and humanity’s place within it. The glass vessels in my works refer to this tradition and its illustrations. Heavenly Herbs sketches spagyrics, a medieval alchemical method for preparing concentrated herbal extracts that took into account the ruling planet of each plant. In turn, As Above, So Below compares the life cycle of a dandelion with celestial events. Its title echoes the second line of the Emerald Tablet, considered foundational by medieval alchemists. The

phrase refers to the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm – how events in the spiritual or higher realms reflect those in the physical world.

The installations Metsänpeitto and Myötäpäivään focus on the mythological powers of the forest, the fortress of the plant kingdom. In Finnish nature worship, metsänpeitto (lit. forest's cover/blanket) meant the disappearance of people and cattle into the forest's otherness: one did not simply get lost but slipped out of sight of this reality. This was counteracted, for example, by walking around the domestic animals sunwise (myötäpäivään) in spring, hiding salt in hollow bird feathers or, after Christianity had taken over the worldview of our ancestors, by building barns in the same direction as the church. According to an old tradition, those who spent the night in the forest avoided metsänpeitto by asking: 'Good earth’s wights, give me sleep to sleep, rest to rest, I do not want forever, only for a time!' (1).

1/ Heikki Roiko-Jokela: Ihminen ja metsä - kohtaamisia arjen historiassa, 2012
Thank Alfred Kordelin Foundation and Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the exhibition.

Elsa Salonen (b.1984, Turku, Finland) works in Berlin, Germany (studio location) and the Turku archipelago, Finland. Salonen’s art has been exhibited internationally at institutions including, KINDL Centre For Contemporary Art and Villa Merkel in Germany; Art Sonje Center in South Korea; Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthal Viborg in Denmark; Galleri F 15 in Norway and Miguel Urrutia Art Museum in Colombia. Her artworks are included in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (FI), Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (FI), Saastamoinen Foundation (FI), and Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art (IT). A Permanent Public Artwork by Salonen is situated in the Quiet Room of Meilahti Bridge Hospital, Helsinki (FI).