Maiju Hukkanen https://maijuhukkanen.com Visual Artist Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:34:25 +0000 fi hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 Nousuvesi https://maijuhukkanen.com/nousuvesi/ Sun, 07 Sep 2025 05:31:00 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=734 High tide

At high tide, it feels like all kinds of things wash ashore. Traces of pasts that have nothing to do with me. Boxes full of stuff from other times. In the middle of an unspoiled environment, signs of our presence still become visible. Who knows what lies on the bottom of the sea – and how much.

Gallery Huuto, Helsinki, 2025

]]> Tänään ihan hetken https://maijuhukkanen.com/tanaan-ihan-hetken/ Sun, 02 Jun 2024 05:30:05 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=596 For a while today

For a while today I felt like just a being in this body. Without gender or goals, a profession. I’m foraging mushrooms, using this body of mine. These eyes. I’m nothing, but something nonetheless.

Helsinki Artists’ Association HAA gallery, 2024

]]> Kaksi vuodenaikaa https://maijuhukkanen.com/kaksi-vuodenaikaa/ Fri, 16 Jun 2023 05:29:28 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=480 Two seasons

Come spring the feeling of having nothing to give started to fade.

Works made during a year spent in Lapland with the companion of a dog-friend, 2022.

]]> Päiviä, jotka rytmittyvät päiväunien mukaan https://maijuhukkanen.com/days-following-the-rhythm-of-daydreams/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:27:57 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=232 Days following the rhythm of daydreams

These pictures are observations of two separate but intertwined lives. Of two kinds of loneliness and longing for closeness. Of days following the rhythm of daydreams. An animal and a human being. One forced to stay inside their limited environment and the other one choosing to do so.

My drawings show an animal in the middle of spaces made for humans. I have attempted to study the state at which an animal realises itself in flat, hard and closed environments made for us. There is always some kind of an obstacle through, between or under which the external, less organised world is shown.

Putting oneself in the position of members of other species is difficult, but the need to understand and mirror oneself against them persists. Animals can adapt to a human environment, but how do they experience their limited freedom?

Helsinki Art Museum HAM Gallery, 2022

]]> Möyhentäjät https://maijuhukkanen.com/moyhentajat/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:26:36 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=430 Stirrers

There’s a world beneath us that is often left invisible.

My understanding of soil life is probably as narrow as that of most of us. I wanted to draw something more than just an enabler of growth and an instrument – an entity itself. Complexity that lives and changes regardless of us.

Layers and crossings and beings that fit into a fistful of soil.

The work is part of Trophic verses – an artistic exploration into the life and phenomena in and around of Earth’s body of soil.

Viikki, Helsinki 2020

]]> Unia tiloista, jotka johtavat umpikujaan https://maijuhukkanen.com/unia-tiloista-jotka-johtavat-umpikujaan/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:21:18 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=427 Dreams of spaces leading nowhere

Something I’ve seen while sleeping: spaces that have a logic of a feeling. Some have been with me since childhood, others new and oppressively exciting. 

Series of works made during spring 2020.

]]> This is not my beautiful house https://maijuhukkanen.com/this-is-not-my-beautiful-house/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:17:06 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=423 The mind is a room that has objects in it, a particular order. Picturing that room I struggle to find sensibility. Where is this place?

It’s not how I thought it would be.

This is not my beautiful house is a group of works that came from an effort to draw an understandable view out of elements that disintegrate just like that.

Odenplan metro station gallery Montern, Stockholm 2019

]]> Metaanimerenrannalla https://maijuhukkanen.com/metaanimerenrannalla/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:09:58 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=420 By the methane sea

Let us say that instead of water there would flow methane. One would inhale hydrogen gas. To imagine something that is unattainable by both distance and circumstances.

–

I have recently thought about places that are so remote that almost anything can be imagined there. It is possible that we have never even been to these spheres.

And yet the shapes seem vaguely familiar. There is something animate in the almost inanimate form. Discarded shells that may once have been dwellings. Emptiness arises from the lack of prepared activities. Maybe this place is meant for another kind of intelligence.

I am only sure about one thing: it is quiet in here.

Kuvan Kevät, ex-Amos Anderson museum 2018

]]> Tein sinulle hyvän kodin https://maijuhukkanen.com/tein-sinulle-hyvan-kodin/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 06:54:12 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=417 I made you a good home

In a recurrent dream I find a rodent cage on top of my closet. I’ve forgotten its existence for months, maybe years. The animals run wild and have reproduced uncontrollably. I try to divide them into smaller metallic and plastic cages – just to stop the breeding. One has lain dead in its nest for a long time.

My charcoal drawings and installation base on the interest towards our relation to other species and the habit of building nature-like environments for us and to those others. How natural materials are seamlessly combined with plastic, metal and glass. Slippery and hard surfaces in which claws rustle and teeth sink into slower. Amidst these themes I’ve tried to shatter my ways of crafting images and tolerate the imperfectness of drawing.

What kind of values are mixed into a structure in which we try to provide special surroundings to a creature of another kind? Can they be assimilated to spaces made for ourselves and the way it feels in them?

Project Room, Helsinki 2017

]]> Exhibition no. 2 https://maijuhukkanen.com/exhibition-no-2/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 06:43:10 +0000 https://maijuhukkanen.com/?p=414 Series of four monotype prints called Änäkänselän asutuksen jäänteitä I-IV (Remainings of Änäkänselkä habitation I-IV), all 59,4 × 84,1 cm. I thought of finding signs of first native settlements around my summer cabin woods. These were seen in the Exhibition no. 2 of our since defunct co-operative group called Cornershop.

Porvoonkatu bar, Helsinki 2015

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