Tuula Närhinen’s recent work-in-progress Self-Portrait in Snow(2025) sets out to explore facial pareidolia, the tendency to see ‘hidden faces’ in the natural world. Snow is harnessed to work as a spiritual medium that provides access to a speculative pictorial heritage. Drawing from 19th century methods of visual empiricism, Närhinen’s playful project revisits anthropometric survey techniques. The work introduces a collection of facial imprints, generated by pressing the visage tightly against snow cover.
Counterintuitively, instead of auto-portraits, these head dives into snow generated depictions of strangers surfacing from the bosom of the earth. In browsing this ghostly archive, Närhinen was surprised to find the spitting image of her bearded late father and, subsequently, she spotted more vivid likenesses to other family members as well. Starting with the images of her ancestors to portrayals of her unborn children, the speculative record yielded the phenotype of her entire clan.
Among the blindly generated mugshots she was also able to identify some serendipitous imprints, such as the portrait of one famous Finn, the former President of the Republic Urho Kekkonen (who may be related to Närhinen via maternal lineage of university students from the northern Ostrobothnia region).
This ephemeral tribe emerging from the snow allows us to envision a cultural DNA reaching from totemic past towards future generations.
