Alternature

Christoffer Relander

Alternature invites viewers into a dialogue between people and nature, using photography to trace the shifting boundaries where memory, environment, and imagination meet. Christoffer Relander employs his distinctive multiple-exposure technique to extend the possibilities of photographic expression and challenge conventional ways of seeing. The exhibition unites three significant bodies of work, including We Are Nature, Doubled Days, and Jarred & Displaced, with each offering a unique perspective on our connection to nature.

In We Are Nature, portraits are integrated with textures and details from the natural world, creating hybrid figures that blur the boundaries between humanity and environment. Unlike the immediacy of Doubled Days, this series follows a slower and more deliberate process, with many works carefully sketched and planned rather than left to pure experimentation.

Doubled Days presents fragments of everyday life through spontaneous double exposures, transforming ordinary experiences into layered visual diaries. Jarred & Displaced preserves familiar landscapes within glass jars, evoking both memory and the human desire to contain what is ephemeral.

Together, these works invite viewers to reconsider their relationship with nature. Through dreamlike yet precise imagery, ALTERNATURE reflects on belonging, memory, and the fragile balance between people and the environments they inhabit.

Doubled Days

Doubled Days is a long-term project based in spontaneity and process. Unlike Christoffer Relander’s more constructed works, these images are created intuitively, often in everyday settings, using multiple exposures to layer moments from daily life. The series began as an experiment in freeing photography from the pressure of perfection, embracing chance, imperfection, and serendipity. Scenes of family life, commutes, encounters with light and shadow, and momentary details are transformed into layered visual poems. Each image becomes part diary, part memory, recording time not as a linear sequence but as overlapping fragments. By allowing coincidence to guide the compositions, Doubled Days embodies a raw, human quality; intimate, imperfect, and open-ended. While deeply connected to Relander’s everyday surroundings, the work also draws on his travels to Sweden and mainland Finland, extending the diary beyond home while retaining its personal and poetic character.

Doubled Days #2

Doubled Days #1

Doubled Days #39

Doubled Days #6

Doubled Days #35

Doubled Days #5

Doubled Days #27

Doubled Days #18

Doubled Days #26

Doubled Days #13

Doubled Days #34

Doubled Days #17

Doubled Days #24

Doubled Days #37

Doubled Days #38

Scroll →

We Are Nature

We Are Nature was Christoffer Relander’s first major project, begun in 2010. In this series, portraits are layered with textures and details from the natural world — bark, branches, foliage, and organic forms — creating hybrid figures that dissolve the boundaries between humanity and environment. All textures were photographed during the first frost, when surfaces are crystalline and fragile, adding a sense of impermanence and memory to the work.

The series follows a slightly different process from Relander’s other projects. While every element is photographed in the same way he always works, the compositions are assembled in external software. This method has allowed him to expand his expression, giving space to imagination and conceptual exploration without being overly constrained by technique. The results are images that are both deliberate and dreamlike, based in close observation yet open to interpretation.

Most works were created near Relander’s home in Finland, often in surrounding forests or even his own backyard, grounding the project in the familiar. We Are Nature brought him early recognition and confirmed his path as a full-time art photographer.

Triplets

Resting Butterfly

Frosted Back

First Frost

Butterfly Mind

Blood Ties

Collector

Scroll →

Jarred & Displaced

In Jarred & Displaced, landscapes, forests, and familiar places are photographed through layered exposures to appear contained within glass jars. These surreal images transform vast outdoor scenes into fragile, collectible objects — part specimen, part memory vessel. The series, begun in 2014, draws on Relander’s childhood experiences of nature and the instinct to preserve what is fleeting. By miniaturising forests, fields, and villages into jars, the project reflects on memory, nostalgia, and the human desire to hold on to places that cannot truly be contained.
The jars evoke both scientific specimens and keepsakes, balancing between personal recollection and universal longing. At the same time, the work suggests displacement — the way memory alters and transports landscapes, removing them from their original context. Jarred & Displaced resonates as a poetic commentary on preservation and loss, showing how our attempts to “store” nature and memory inevitably reshape them. The series has been exhibited internationally, where it continues to invite viewers to reflect on their own relationships to memory, place, and the natural world.

Winter Pine

Cold Cottage

Snowbound Forest

Scroll →