Exhibition in Gallery Kellokas – Elina Priha: From the Earth You Came

From the Earth You Came

8 June – 22 July 2026

In recent years, I have spent extended periods of time on both familiar and unfamiliar islands. Through the histories and ecologies of these islands, my artistic research intertwines with women’s histories, corporeality, and different ways of relating to the surrounding world. I explore these themes primarily through textile art.

The exhibition title From the Earth You Came refers to the material origin of the human body, its fragility, and the cyclical nature of life. Earth is simultaneously a beginning and an end — a place from which life emerges and to which it ultimately returns. On islands, this connection feels particularly tangible: water creates boundaries, while land binds the human body to a slower ecological temporality in which the boundaries between humans and other living beings begin to soften.

Do the seemingly clear physical boundaries of an island also offer a possibility to perceive the limits of one’s own humanity more distinctly? An island can appear as a space where socially imposed ways of being momentarily loosen and identity is allowed to move more freely, to become untamed. I am interested in islands as places where norms and categories temporarily lose their stability, and where queer identity can more freely take shape in relation to environment, embodiment, and more-than-human life in ways that differ from the structured realities of the mainland.

The visual language of my tapestries draws from traditional Finnish weaving symbolism, Karelian embroidery patterns, and Finno-Ugric mythology, interwoven with organic forms. My process is a collaboration with the material itself: I work primarily with recycled textiles and yarns, allowing the final form of the works to remain partially undefined. The materials carry layers of use, touch, and time — a kind of embodied memory that cannot be reduced to singular narratives, but instead exists through sensations, gestures, and quietly transmitted forms of knowledge.

I think of working with textiles as a form of soft activism and feminism grounded in slowness, care, and listening to the memories embedded within materials. I am interested in how textiles can preserve traces of people, places, and stages of life, functioning as soft archives of lived experience. The repetitive and slow rhythm of weaving becomes a way of connecting both to my own body and to the surrounding world — to the earth from which we come and to which we ultimately return.

IG @elinapriha