NKF Sweden warmly welcomes our sister organisation NKF Finland, which will begin the 2026 residency period in the Nordic Guest Studio. This residency marks a renewed phase of exchange, building on the long-standing history of collaboration between our sister organisations. The Finnish NKF board has selected the artists participating in this exchange, and we are very pleased to welcome them.
Elina Koskimies lives and works in Helsinki. Structural and chromatic changes in the environment are central starting points in her practice, often connected to her own movements between different places and to human-induced transformations of the landscape. Her work carries traces of life by the Archipelago Sea in Utö, where she lived between 2010 and 2019, as well as more recent experiences from the banks of the Kumo River and its surrounding forests. Changes in water environments and their flora are of particular interest to her. Koskimies mainly works with water-soluble painting techniques such as watercolour, various tempera methods and fresco technique. Since her studies in Italy, she has continuously explored fresco painting, combining painting, drawing and writing with mineral, stone and earth pigments, where materials and layers become an integral part of the work’s narrative.
Heli Änkö lives and works on Suomenlinna in Helsinki, Finland. She is interested in the interplay of light and water, and in environments where it is possible to see far into the distance, both physically and through historical layers, across time and space. Her works emerge from inspiring situations that reflect a sense of community and peaceful contemplation, combined with subtle details of something strange, eccentric or humorous. Guiding growth in a garden and observing the wonders of nature become visible images through the painting process. Änkö usually works with water-soluble painting materials, recently watercolours and ink on paper, appreciating the lightness and simplicity of their expression as well as their more ecological qualities. Her work has recently been shown at Galleria Aski in Turku and Galleria Huuto in Helsinki.
Maija Holma is an architectural photographer, that lives in Jyväskylä, Finland, and has worked at the Alvar Aalto Museum in Jyväskylä since 1995. Between 1998 and 2018 she was also active as a photographic artist, with solo and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Her artistic themes have included natural and man-made environments, unintended cultural landscapes, traces of human presence in vacant spaces, and feelings of care, vulnerability and consolation expressed through materials and accidental still lifes. In recent years she has focused primarily on her work at the Alvar Aalto Museum. In 2024 she spent three months in Japan, tracing the connection between Finnish and Japanese sensibilities in relation to architecture. Holma is a first-year board member of NKF Finland.
We also previously welcomed a visit by Tom Sjöberg, board member of NKF Sweden, to the Nordic Guest Studio.