Soil, transplanted turf, transparent film, digital print.
Mound: 250 x 90 x 80 cm
Book: 21 x 14.8 cm
Installation view, Museum of Photography, Estonia, 2026. Photos 3-8 by Meeli Küttim
On the Grass is a work that draws on childhood memories, a longing for summer, and the softness associated with the homeyard. At its core is perhaps an imagined past, shaped as much by memory as by experience.
The work is conceived for the small courtyard of the Photography Museum in Tallinn, a space where sunlight does not reach even at the height of summer. Its stone walls and cobblestone paving evoke an environment far removed from the warm, soft and intimate image of the childhood home yard.
The installation consists of two interconnected elements. The first is a grass-covered mound that invites the viewer to lie down and look up at the summer sky. The turf offers a tactile encounter with softness and enclosure, allowing the body to settle into the work while the gaze and imagination drift upwards. Lying on the mound, the viewer can take the artist’s photobook into their hands and follow a series of views of the sky, photographed in the artist’s own “home yard”. The sky visible from the Photography Museum’s courtyard thus becomes juxtaposed with images of another place and another time, bringing two spatial and temporal experiences into dialogue.
The work continues the artist’s recent exploration of temporal displacement within space, using photography and spatial installation to create a situation in which memory, place and present experience overlap.