Butterflies Released from Beneath the Ice
Watercolors, Montages, and Dioramas by Julia Janka at Tampere House, 31 July – 28 August 2025
The theme of artist and naturalist Julia Janka’s exhibition is the impact of climate change on the lives of butterflies. Butterflies are a good indicator for observing environmental changes. On display are watercolors, montages, and a three-dimensional model of the butterflies’ habitat. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 31 July at 5 PM and runs until 28 August.
Janka’s exhibition spans the period from the Ice Age to the present day and focuses geographically on Kemi and Tampere in Finland, as well as Tartu in Estonia.
“The last glacier of the Weichselian glaciation retreated from Estonia about 13,000 years ago, leaving behind extensive esker formations, such as the Tartu esker, on which the city of Tartu was later founded. The hunter-gatherers living in Estonia at the time did not notice these changes in their environment. Likewise, the moose and deer hunters roaming around Tampere didn’t perceive the moment when the highest eskers, like Pyynikki and Kalevanharju, rose from the sea as islands,” explains Julia Janka.
“In Kemi, located at the northern end of the Bothnian Bay, signs of the Ice Age are still clearly visible. Because the continental glacier was very thick in that area, no eskers were formed there. Instead, the land is still rising, and as a result, the shoreline continues to shift seaward.”
Changes are slow, but shifts in the distribution of butterflies often reveal changes that go unnoticed by the human eye. “They move quickly between countries and even continents. Butterflies can help us perceive changes in our environment. In the past decade, more than ten new species of day butterflies have arrived in Finland from Russian Karelia and across the Gulf of Finland from Estonia,” says Janka.
Janka’s exhibition is both informative and strongly narrative and aesthetic. “What is a butterfly’s journey to Finland like? How far can a butterfly fly in a day? The exhibition portrays the cross-border flight of butterflies in a scientific yet dramatic way. Butterflies must migrate through winds, storms, and rain, as well as under the scorching sun. Natural predators and human-caused threats also pose dangers to them,” the artist says, describing the theme of the exhibition.