Artist's Statement


My work explores intense psychological themes. I am interested in the invisible struggles everyone faces and so I create images that are deeply emotional and reflect an inner turmoil. Much of my work is self-portraits where various parts of my body are shown but never my face. I deliberately use a soft pastel colour palette to create an unashamedly feminine aesthetic and set of ideas to highlight the truth that women are already bound, living under the weight of expectations and demands.


Legacy and Hush are my two long-term projects I have been working on contemporaneously between 2016-2021 . Although separate bodies of work they are intertwined. In each I deal with similar themes of restraint, entanglement and the desire for freedom coupled with the fear of it but from slightly different perspectives.


Legacy is about the burdens we carry that prevent us from living the life we want and from becoming who we want to be. How it is often our own fears and self-destructive patterns that stop us. We might be painfully aware of this, but do not dare to, or are not able to change.


Hush deals with living a life in secrecy from which there seems to be no escape. Sorrow and longing are interspersed with glimpses of hope and desire. However, the strength to break free is missing – always being drawn back, staying hidden and so becoming stuck in your life. This decision to remain keeps you suppressed. You have been silenced, but you have also become the silence


Flawed is an ongoing series I have been working with since 2021. Flawed deals with the feelings of believing you are both too much and not enough. You try your best to be like the perfect woman, look like the perfect woman, but still feel you are faulty. You feel overwhelmed with demands and fearing to let go.


Ribbons are an important motif in both series, representing both the harnesses that hold us in place, keeping us stuck, and also the anguish we carry. It might be us keeping them, or it might be someone or something else putting them around us. The ribbons also act as a feminine symbol for the fight and desire for freedom as a woman.


Jenni Granholm Finland (2023)





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