THE STUDIO IN THE FOREST

Inside Emmi Iida’s countryside atelier

Emmi Iida is a Finnish artist working across music, visual art and spatial design. Her work explores the relationship between sound, space and emotion — how environments shape the way we think, feel and create.

Her atelier sits in the Finnish countryside, an hour away from Helsinki, surrounded by forest and open land. It’s where most of her recent work has been created — including her upcoming album DESCENDING and her latest paintings.

We asked her about the space, her process, and why silence has become central to everything she does.

What is this space to you?

It’s where everything begins. Not just physically, but mentally. When I’m here, things become very clear. There’s no noise, no pressure — just space to think and feel.

Your work moves between music, painting and writing. How does that work in practice?

They’re not separate for me. It always starts with a feeling. Sometimes that becomes a sound, sometimes a painting. The space allows that to happen naturally without forcing it into one format.

Why is silence so important in your process?

Because that’s where everything starts. When there’s no external noise, you can actually hear what’s underneath — ideas, emotions, intuition. If the space is too full, you miss that.

How have you designed the atelier to support that?

By removing anything unnecessary. There are only a few objects here — things I actually use. Light, materials, textures… everything is quite minimal. The goal is that nothing interrupts the process.

You’ve lived in different cities before. What changed when you moved here?

Pace. In cities, everything is faster and more reactive. Here, there’s more time to go deeper into ideas. It’s also a return to something more natural. That’s influenced my work a lot — it’s become simpler, but also more honest.

What does a typical day look like here?

Mornings are usually quiet — writing, sketching, thinking. Until my partner and three kids wake up: It has become even more important to find that time of quiet before the chaos begins. Later in the day I focus on music or painting, depending on what inspires me the most.. It’s quite intuitive, I don’t force a schedule.

What are you working on right now?

My next album, DESCENDING. It’s very much about returning — to simplicity, to grounding, to something more real. And at the same time, I’m painting a lot. Those two processes are happening side by side.

In the end, the atelier is not just a workspace: It’s a system that supports clarity in the process of creation, a place where things can emerge without interruption. And where silence is not the absence of something — but the beginning of it.

Explore more from the atelier in the Journal and discover available works in the collection.