The work of former anorexic Salla Tykkä, whose short films are being screened outdoors in Temple Bar this month, delves into the murky world of girls' self-image. This private theme has brought her huge public success, she tells Aidan Dunne

Salla Tykkä still seems a bit nonplussed by the level of attention she's received since her enigmatic short film, Lasso, was one of the hits of last year's Venice Biennale. "Some days I can get 10 or 15 e-mails asking me for work, asking me to show in various places. I'm flattered and very happy, but sometimes the tone is more one of commanding me than asking - 'Send this now!' I can't do everything. I don't have an assistant. That all started after Venice. But I still love reading my e-mails and I try to respond as well as I can."

Tykkä, who is in her late 20s, is still completing her MA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, where she lives. She is in Dublin for the Irish premières of Lasso and her most recent short film, Thriller, and she is concerned about the quality of the presentation. Not unduly worried, just, as a bit of a perfectionist, naturally concerned. The quality of the image matters to her.

"When I saw a 35mm print of Lasso I thought the image was so beautiful. Now I know that beauty is there, so I want to have it." Prior to that, she had made do with video prints from the original film stock.

"When you look at the beta print compared to the cinema-quality image, it's not that it's bad, it's not that it's pixillated or anything, but there is no comparison in quality," she says. In fact, the level of accomplishment of her work, technically and conceptually, has been consistently striking.

Although "consistently" may be overstating it, given what has been, as she points out with a smile, a very short career to date. "It's all happened very quickly," she says.

When she originally went to art school, in 1995, "I associated video art with grey, grainy, unfocused, unsteady works, with maybe someone screaming or something like that. Now I think there are quite a lot of artists who have a good knowledge of film, who understand about production. I find that film is a very sensitive medium, very close to painting and drawing, and sometimes people do not appreciate that. You have to think carefully about every image, about what it might imply."

She had, she says, always loved drawing and painting, and still does. But after an intensive period of drawing in her first year of study, she found she wanted another approach. She found it on both sides of the camera lens, as both observer and observed, subject and object. In this she was embarking on a strategy exemplified in the work of such formidable figures as the great surrealist photographer, actress and writer, Claude Cahun; Cindy Sherman, of the influential Untitled Film Stills, and the short-lived Francesca Woodman. All enact or enacted dramas of identity, and so does Tykkä.

From the beginning her work has had a sharp edge to it, an element of ruthless self-analysis. It has also, in its initial stages, been described as self-therapeutic, in that it relates to her experience of anorexia. In a concise video self-examination called My Hate is Useless, she overdubs a poem she wrote herself:

I am gaining weight and it feels like I am drowning.

I eat an apple and flush it down with water.

Then I go for a jog thinking what I can eat afterwards.

I am sane. I am not sane."

It was the only time she has used words on a soundtrack; she prefers to communicate in images and music. In the photographic series, Sick, More Sick, The Sickest One, an element of surrealism, which has been a hallmark ever since, appears. Not Dalí-esque surrealism, more David Lynch, whose films she greatly admires. In Sick, for example, a young woman sits at a restaurant table. In a perfectly poised, ordinary photograph, it takes a moment to realise that blood is oozing from her ear.

Tykkä likes Lynch's visual and psychological intensity. She also cites Bergman as an influence. "I haven't seen anything of his for some time, but Bergman was the first director whose films really touched me in the way that a good work of art does," she says. "Of course, sometimes it is difficult to categorise what is art and what is film, or architecture or whatever, but the art world is the art world, and it is not ideal, but it makes things clear."

Lasso and Thriller are the first two parts of a projected trilogy dealing imaginatively with the transition of a girl from childhood to adulthood. The films try to convey a sense of "the world seen through her eyes", to enter into her emotional world. In Lasso, the girl, returning from a run in the forest, approaches a house and spies on a young man inside. He is performing an extraordinary athletic routine with a lasso. The soundtrack is drawn from Ennio Morricone's music from Once Upon a Time in the West. These relatively simple elements in unlikely combination produce a wealth of complex, ambiguous effects.

Tykkä doesn't answer too many questions for the viewer. As she puts it: "Sometimes, looking at a film, I think that if it is too finished, too complete, it doesn't leave any space for the viewer."

And she likes to leave such a space in her own work? She laughs. "Perhaps I leave so much space because I don't know how to fill it yet. No. I do want to leave that opening, and I think my own works will stay abstract in that way."

Her quotation of film music has become a recurrent device. "People don't tend to say, 'oh, that's the music from such-and-such a film'. It's more that you recognise the music, but you see it in a new context, so that it mixes with the emotions you feel now and your memory."

While she is rightly wary of saying what her work is about, she does at one point offer the suggestion that it is always partly about looking: "There is this idea of watching life as you would watch a movie."

Thriller, its title inspired by the Michael Jackson album, actually employs music from two horror films, Halloween and Carrie. The core of the film was "a couple of scenes that were on my mind. They are not personal memories, but they are things that I might have imagined at a certain time". The girl, this time inside a "spooky" house, looks out on her parents outside, engaged in mundane, in fact meaningless, activities. "Outside it is cold and grey. Inside is her passion, her sexual awakening, her sense of her own power.

"There is an element of evil, this quality of morality, how cruel human nature is. She is cruel, and because she is a child she knows she will not be punished, but she is not really a child any more."

If much of Tykkä's earlier work falls in with the practice of using the body as the site for art, a certain ambivalence emerges in her attitude. Although she is often her own protagonist and sometimes, as in Power (a black-and-white film in which a woman boxes with a much bigger, male sparring partner), in extremely demanding ways, as soon as she sees the images, she feels as though they depict someone else.

"I know this is me, but the 'me' becomes 'she', becomes an object. It's strange. I know that in every artist's work the artist is present in some way. But I don't think of it as me."

Her use of physical activities in her films is reflected in her life. In reply to a question about whether she still runs, she says yes, though not lately, and goes on to mention her other sporting activities. These include kick-boxing, slalom, free diving and, last year, training for a team adventure sports competition that included, among other things, mountain biking and canoeing.

She drew the line at fishing "because I am a vegetarian". She has just finished a photographic project that she has worked on intermittently for about a year. "It's about young women playing the role of different animals. I used five different women and they play all the animals. It's not too serious. It's about the way when you are children you play at being animals. And girls have this connection with ponies. But the idea is that you act at being an animal and then one day you stop and you act at being a woman," she says.

Her taste of international success certainly hasn't gone to her head. She is impressively level-headed and matter-of-fact about her work, partly because she knows there is a world beyond the art world. "It would be terrible to find that some day I know only about what is going on in the art world. I never use my free time to go to openings or anything like that. It doesn't matter whether people say good or bad of me.

"I just want to live my life and make good works, and if I listened too much to others that wouldn't be possible."

Thriller (seven minutes, 45 seconds) is on view at Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, nightly from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. until Saturday and on March 19th-23rd. Lasso (three minutes, 48 seconds) is on view at Meeting House Square, nightly from 8 p.m.-11pm on March 12th-16th and 26th-30th.

Salla Tykkä will discuss her work with Francis McKee at 6 p.m. this evening at Temple Bar Properties, 18 Eustace Street, Dublin 2. The discussion is free, but booking is necessary (tel: 01-6772255).