Wind by Finnish artist Riitta Päiväläinenis is a project created in the early 2000s in Finland and England, using discarded clothing installed in open landscapes to examine memory, absence, and the human traces carried by fabric.
The series emerges from Paivalainen’s practice of combining site-specific installation with photography. In Wind, second-hand garments become provisional documents: worn seams, faded colors, and torn cloth suggest lives that remain outside official archives. The work also draws on a Nordic cultural imagination in which solitude, climate, and a close relationship with nature shape ideas of identity. Rather than presenting landscape as neutral territory, Paivalainen treats it as a stage where personal history and memory briefly intersect.
Visually, the photographs show dresses, coats, ribbons, and other fabrics suspended, stretched, or caught by air in forests, fields, riverbanks, and snowy terrain. The images are in color, often balancing muted greens, browns, grays, and whites with the distinct hues and patterns of the textiles. Natural light, fog, mist, or rain contributes to a quiet atmosphere, while the wind gives the still photograph a sense of movement. Empty garments appear to hold the volume of absent bodies, creating a flickering exchange between presence and disappearance.
Paivalainen travels with second-hand clothing, installing it directly in remote landscapes. Wind is not merely an atmospheric condition but the work’s animating force, filling the fabric or pulling it into temporary sculptural forms. This approach developed from her earlier Ice Project, where garments were frozen into rigid shapes; in Wind, air replaces ice as the element that gives the clothing form. Once the image is made, the installation is dismantled, leaving the photograph as the record of a moment that no longer exists.
Paivalainen's work has been shown in international contexts connected to the Helsinki School and is represented in public collections including Kiasma in Helsinki and the State Art Council in Sweden.
