Ilkka Halso is a Finnish artist who investigates the relationships between architecture, technology and nature, through photo-realistic renderings and collages set in natural environments. In “Tree Works”, light structures are built around existing trees with the aim of protecting them and, at the same time, of turning them into a sort of “living museum” of nature explorable by a public. Nature is somehow commodified and transformed into a spectacle to admire from very close. The architectural language is that of the scaffolding, transitional structures used to build a construction or to refurbish it: the act of connecting metal poles to natural environments engages a surreal discourse based on man’s paradoxical attempt to preserve what he’s currently destroying. This theme is the specific subject of the series “Restoration” (2000-2005).
In Ilkka Halso words:
“I show ironic visions of mans relation to nature and his confidence in technology in solving problems caused by his own activities .I builded fictive restoration sites. Scaffoldings are covering objects of nature instead of houses and man-made objects. Trees, boulders, rock faces and fields are under repair.”
All images © Ilkka Halso