Grey Cobalt by Felicia Honkasalo bases itself around a collection of artefacts steeped in the landscape and history of her native Finland. In a sequence of delicately arranged images, Grey Cobalt contains both a meditation on the legacy left by her metallurgist grandfather and a larger, sweeping narrative of how different orders of time and memory impress themselves upon the land, like a palimpsest. Now ‘rearranged and newly ordered, like a cabinet of curiosities’, together these images form a tactile experience of a lost world. Honkasalo creates multiple narratives from seemingly disparate objects, forming alternative cosmologies from her own observations and sense of the distant past. A selection of notes written by Felicia’s grandfather, and expanded upon by herself, are included as epilogue and reflection upon the book and the objects exhibited; a musing on the historical moment in which they were created and the present they in turn disrupt.
Through this sequence of images juxtaposing and complimenting one another, Grey Cobalt obliquely connects personal, historical and geological traces across space and time. An accompanying long form prose piece by Ada Smailbegovic expands these traces further, using images and a fragmentary style to conjure an invisible world of objects and places.
144 pages, 21 x 18.5 cm, softcover, Loose Joints (London).