Päivi Setälä is PhD from the Aalto University School of Art and Design, Department of Photography (2012) and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Turku (1999) with a major in film and television science. Setälä has managed the Pori Children's Cultural Center since its establishment in 2003. He has received the State Prize for Children's Culture 2010. Setälä is a member of the Association of Photographic Artists and the Association of Finnish Critics, as well as an active cultural policy influencer. Setälä protects forests, elephants and the Finnish language.

I am a writer, reader and photographer. Visually, I am interested in details, views and memory. My subjects are animals (especially elephants), deserted spaces, sign language gestures, flower dresses and greenhouses. Photographically, my pictures are about the prevailing natural light and the seemingly natural situations that are staged. In my art - in photographs and texts - I combine constructed and uncontrolled.

The works are created by experimenting and combining different techniques, printing methods and finishing techniques. I use both fast and slow photographic processes and programs or platforms that are not actually intended for artistic production. The starting points of photographs are in the key features of photographic expression: in the search for the limits of precision and inaccuracy and exposure.

It’s also about seeing itself - how the eye focuses and how people see differently - at different ages, at different times. Sometimes everything is fuzzy and difficult to perceive, sometimes unnecessarily sharp.