Polaris

Polaris – the North Star – has been one of the most important points of light in the northern sky. Long before satellite navigation and electric streetlights, it was the quiet fixed point that did not drift with the seasons. For seafarers on the Baltic, for travellers crossing frozen lakes or forest paths, and for people living in the middle of fields and forests, the North Star was a practical tool and a symbolic anchor at the same time. It offered direction when the landscape disappeared into snow and darkness, and it carried the idea that in the middle of all this movement there is something that holds still. In the mythology and folk imagination of the north, this creates a strong image: a star at the “top” of the sky that ties the visible world to something larger, older and more stable than any one of us.

Bringing Polaris into the exhibition space turns this cultural role into an experience. Instead of a distant point on the sky dome, the star becomes a large, physical presence above the viewer. Standing under it, the audience finds themselves in a position that is usually reserved for migrating birds and other animals: they become the ones oriented by a star. This shifts the focus from “light as something we look at” to “light as something that organises us” – our movements, our stories and our inner seasons. The work speaks to the way northern life is woven into long periods of darkness and brief, intense phases of light, and to how people here have always had to negotiate their place within that cycle rather than outside it.

Materially, the work keeps this connection to the tangible north. The star is built from dark-stained Finnish birch plywood and steel bolts, so that from below the viewer sees only familiar, “honest” materials: wood and metal. Hundreds of LEDs are hidden in the layered structure, so the viewer does not meet individual light sources, but a soft, indirect glow that seeps from between the layers. The atmosphere is closer to a fireplace in a winter's night than to a technical object of light. In this sense, Polaris is between visible and invisible, between practical navigation and quiet myth, between the winter's sleeping landscape and the spring's first, modest promise of returning light.