Ever since her debut at the end of the 1980s, Henrietta Lehtonen has been attracting attention with works in which the role of women, partly using traditionally female picture-making techniques, have been at the centre. In Girls´ Needlework (1992) one theme was the embroidery technique itself, in Porcelain Tower (1993) it was porcelain painting. But, at the same time as Lehtonen´s personal interest has drawn her to the roots of handicraft, she also wanted to disrupt these traditions through pointing to the flawed or the repressed, often to the sexual defined as dirty.

The fascinating video installation The Dream (1992) shows a happy land: a summer garden where boys dream of girls, girls of children, and where the nightingale is never silent. But, perhaps happiness is only a ´televisual´ cliché? The summer garden is followed by a late winter in a series of sculpted Bambi images (The Return of Winter, 1995) The symbol of childhood innocence, Bambi, is menaced and sexually harassed, frozen to the ice and, in the end, brutally murdered. The installation is an image of the wrecked nursery, the paradise that is lost.

Now, Lehtonen herself says that, for her, the feminist label is a tired, over-simplified cliché. She tests out the possibility of subtly disconcerting the spectator, of disturbing the balance, of making the viewer’s hair stand on end!

Two works with the same title, Poisonous Skirt (1999), can be understood against this background. One of the skirts actually belonged to the artist. A closer inspection of the other is perplexing. It has an almost imperceptible bulge at the back, over the backside. Yet the hem of the skirt hangs down normally. It has thus been sewn to conceal an anomaly. What are our anomalies? Are they reflected in the physical deformations that involuntarily reveal our inherent wickedness and lack of solidarity, like the ugliness of the villains in TV films? Or is the toxicity of the skirts a parallel to the defence mechanisms of plants: the poisonous ones do not get eaten?

Lehtonen describes this quality with the potent expressions paha perse, bad ass. It can be described as a Barthesian punctum, a disquieting detail in a whole, a detail that affects, and perhaps frightens us. This brings to mind the nurse in the amazing TV animation South Park, who has a foetus growing out of her head.

The parallel with televisual reality is not so totally far-fetched. Lehtonen often speaks of important experiences that are projected onto us via TV entertainment. The poisoned nightshirt - which was intended to eat holes in a voluptuously beautiful body - was a theme that she remembered from the Angelika films of her childhood, a series that like so many others constructed an image of an 'impossible' woman’s role.

Henrietta Lehtonen´s father is a master tailor. One of his bravura works was actually a costume for a crippled person, which was sewn to concealed balance out the client’s physical deformities. In Ghost (1999) the master tailor’s daughter delights in the fine cloth and the beautiful way it hangs. But what is concealed beneath the cloth?

The starting point for this was quite simply a sighting of a woman, totally swathed in black cloth, gliding through the departure lounge at New Delhi airport a couple of paces behind her husband. It would be tempting to interpret Ghost as reflecting a political interest in the role of women in culture, and perhaps also a topical interest in Islam.

But these works also reflect Lehtonen´s interest in hidden or invisible knowledge. She expresses an admiration for a culture in which one can know without seeing. The work can be read as a counter symbol to western science’s method of laying bare, of unlocking and unravelling the mysteries in a way that parallels the strategies of pornography, which excites by showing everything, without finesse.

It is evident that a part of the impact of Henrietta Lehtonen´s work lies in the way that the private, the experienced, is contained in the work. But they do not have to be interpreted as images of the private. The individual becomes universal. What I have experienced, you have experienced, too. The subtle disturbance - Barthes´ punctum - in the transmission makes Lehtonen´s beautiful works thought-provoking. She applies a method that is reminiscent of Helene Schjerfbeck´s, adapted for the sociological climate at the beginning of the 21st century.