Hanna Kanto

Hanna Kanto: Tornedaling, acrylic and oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm, 2024

Hanna Kanto (b.1981 Tornio, Finland) is a painter working on Northern themes. Her work expands on the role and agency that humans have in the local landscape. Her paint simultaneously embodies airiness and earthy rootedness, as well as nature’s temporal chains, interconnectedness, and circulation. Through playing with material properties of paint, Kanto’s work aims to immerse us in layers of the environment.

Kanto blurs natural and industrial themes — revealing our complex entanglement with nature and attitude toward exploiting its resources. Her paintings incorporate scientific apparatus, plant and mineral samples, as well as, microscopic viewpoints that extend our gaze into the smallest particles of the landscape. Her nordic forests are intertwined with local folklore and mythology, which tell the story of a living and interacting world. They open up pathways to other realities, and create endless new transmutations between the material world and dimensions beyond it.

Text by Laura Lowe