Throughout Ulla Jokisalo’s remarkable career she has steadily focused on entering into her own personal dialogue that questions cultural juxtapositions based on gender, femininity, and notions of the uncanny and outlandish to challenge societal norms and associations. Her works are a combination of paper cutouts, masks, embroidery, pins, needles, and thread. Jokisalo masterfully uses these materials as a means to bind together parts of reality, whether they be from her memories or her dreams, she creates her own surreal universe. Her images are poetic compositions that highlight her ability to interlace various ready-made and other found objects together to form an unconscious bridge between dreams a fantasy. Sometimes playful, other times scary, her works circle around fate, memory, and the notion of time. In her own surrealistic exploration Jokisalo peels away at the different layers of our subconscious and the innumerable possibilities of our imaginations. According to the artist, there is no reality that is free from the make-believe and fantasy, as the real palpable world perceives itself from these.
Ulla Jokisalo (*1955 in Kannus, Finland) lives and works in Helsinki. Her work was presented in various solo and group exhibitions, including shows at The Brooklyn Museum (2024), Helsinki Taidehalli (Helsinki, 2021), Hel- sinki Art Museum (Helsinki, 2018), Fo- tografisk Center (Copenhagen, 2018), Gallery Taik Persons, now Persons Proj- ects (Berlin, 2015), or the Finnish Muse- um of Photography (Helsinki, 2011).