VIA DELLA FORNACE 41 50125 FIRENZE
Is a Finnish artist based in London. Her work deals with the concepts of identity, faith and folklore as interpreted through photography and video art. Her work has participated in international exhibitions and in 2019 Lax was awarded the Female in Focus prize by the British Journal of Photography, and was a finalist for the BJP Portrait of Humanity Award for 2020 and the Photography Grant of the PHMuseum. She was selected among the Best New Talent of Photo London 2020 by the Guardian. In 2021, Maria Lax was awarded the Finnish Art Promotion Centre’s One Year Grant.
Taken by the Tide
22.06 – 13.07.2023
There exists a middle ground between our world and the otherworldly, and it is there that Finnish photographer Maria Lax takes us with her images in her sixth solo exhibition hosted by Rifugio Digitale, as part of the SuperNatural series. Returning to her hometown after many years, Lax discovers that the places of her childhood have changed: the map of memories no longer matches the real one. Taken by the Tide is a journey through space and memory, in search of a home that perhaps no longer exists.
Always drawn to folklore, popular… beliefs, and oral storytelling, Lax constructs a universe suspended between intimacy and otherness, where nature and spirits of the past merge into mysterious and luminous visions. Her photographs, hovering between dream and reality, evoke the ancestral power of the Finnish landscape, while the waves of a rising tide seem to carry the artist further and further away from solid ground, toward an undefined and profound elsewhere. 
