Janne Lehtinen has exercised an extremely personal approach in reflecting upon his life and how he has evolved into the person he is today. With the Sacred Bird series, Lehtinen has found his signature by using a curious mixture of emotional life experiences balanced with willpower and a childlike innocence. Consulting himself as his own model, these performance-enhanced, staged photographs carry a sense of melancholy bordering on absurdity – utilising his life as his basic contextual material for self-reflections and photographs as a means for projecting his attitudes towards life. In the Nature of Being, we find him as a solitary figure balancing himself between bricks, balloons and his need to disappear. These photographs appear as disconnected reflections from his inner self. As a storyteller, Lehtinen transforms the antagonist into the victim and then back again, using repetitive variations from the same motif to accentuate his intention. His art is a mixture of sculpture and performance and is realised in the studio or in natural surroundings with no audience. His subject matter may vary from his childhood memories to tracing the working patterns of his father – yet the common denominator found in all his work is how he uses his notion of the family to interpret the ordinary so as to create the extraordinary.