Sari Soininen completed her Bachelor's degree and then gave up photography entirely. In her mid-twenties she experimented with LSD in very unhealthy amounts and ended up having an extended psychotic episode, which had serious consequences for her life but also profoundly changed the way she perceives the world and reality itself. She abandoned all of her worldly possessions. She confronted, in her own words, the demons of Hell, was shown the wonders of Heaven, travelled through time and space, and peeked behind the curtain of this dimension.
When the psychosis began to fade, she started making self-portraits as a form of therapy. It was something to do. Then, quite quickly, it became the most important way she had of dealing with what she was going through. She began using long-shutter speed, projection, and colour gels to reflect her mind. A few years later she went to the UK to do her masters in photography and made the project Transcendent Country of the Mind. This is when photography became an important tool for dealing with her mental health, and when she became one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European fine art photography.
She has since been published in the Financial Times Weekend, Fisheye, LensCulture, the British Journal of Photography, and Liberation Magazine, and was nominated as one of PHMuseum's Top 14 Graduates to Watch in 2021.
