Grey Cobalt by Felicia Honkasalo is a meditation on memory, objects, and time, built around a collection of artefacts steeped in the landscape and history of her native Finland. The book emerges from objects, documents, and photographs inherited from her late grandfather, a metallurgist unknown to her in life. Through these items, Honkasalo reconstructed imagined memories of him at work, his everyday life, and the wet lunches held at mine headquarters during Cold War Finland. Rather than a straightforward biography, the work treats these heirlooms as animate characters with independent bodies and powers, casting light on the frailty of personal memory against the solid forms of things.

The images are delicately arranged and, in the book’s own words, ‘rearranged and newly ordered, like a cabinet of curiosities,’ forming a tactile experience of a lost world. Honkasalo creates multiple narratives from seemingly disparate objects, forming alternative cosmologies from her observations and sense of the distant past. The sequence obliquely connects personal, historical, and geological traces across space and time, offering both a meditation on her grandfather’s legacy and a sweeping narrative of how different orders of time and memory impress themselves upon the land, like a palimpsest. A selection of notes written by her grandfather, expanded upon by Honkasalo, is included as an epilogue and reflection on the book and the objects exhibited.

An accompanying 48-page prose piece by Ada Smailbegovic expands these traces further, using images and a fragmentary style to conjure an invisible world of objects and places. Published by Loose Joints in January 2019, Grey Cobalt is a 144-page Swiss-bound embossed softcover with a thread-sewn booklet, featuring 53 colour and 27 duotone plates, measuring 185 × 210 mm. It is Honkasalo’s first book. Her works have been shown in Finland, Germany, and the UK, and are held in private and public collections. An exhibition at Webber Gallery ran from 10 January to 15 February 2019.