By the Window

'By the Window' (2025) is a collection of digital and traditional mixed media works by Selina Sofia Viitanen.

In this collection, Selina reflects on the experiences of a young person living amid the housing crisis in Ireland. Her research explores deeper into the themes of housing insecurity and its connection to vacant housing and ghost estates around Ireland, and the frustration of coming face to face with abandoned properties that could and should have been homes.

Further moved by the writings of Gaston Bachelard and his philosophical exploration of home and other spaces as shelters for dreaming, Selina's work echoes this sense of longing and home sickness for a personal sanctuary yet to be discovered.

Throughout the development of her creative practice, Selina’s work has been informed by observations made on her walks around the city of Limerick and her everyday commute in and out of the city to a more rural side of County Limerick.

With her interest in vacant houses, Selina brings these observations of visual elements of structures reclaimed by nature and the ongoing decay of these spaces into her work. Windows and visuals of curtains are also a reoccurring element and theme in all her works, and gazing into windows, ones open and ones covered by curtains, is in a sense a ritual and a transportive element into daydreaming of space beyond the reflective surface of the window glass.

With digital photography and collage, Selina pieces together these fragments of daydreams and imaginations of spaces that could have been someone’s corner of the world, but instead are now long forgotten and left decaying.