Curatorial foreword

Imprint of Vulnerability: Embodiment

The joint exhibition Imprint of Vulnerability by Mari Männa and Maria Erikson approaches the artist’s working material as an active participant. Here, fragility and delicacy become strengths: form emerges through cracking and breaking. Deformation and the formation of imprints are not deviations or failures, but processes through which the body remembers, transforms, and shapes its own rhythm. This process requires care.

In the practices of Männa and Erikson, perceptual skills are central: listening, observing, and responding. Männa introduces a logic of cosmic emergence – the birth of shell and organism – in which the old must disintegrate for the new to appear, like a shedding snake, a totem animal in ancient Estonian culture. The world comes into being through disintegration and transitional states, where life has not yet settled into its final form. Erikson moves in the opposite direction, beginning with the wound – with the negative and the scrape – the moment when a surface is opened and compelled to remember. In the dialogue between the two artists, the tools of both sculpture and printmaking shift from auxiliary means to a central mode of thinking. The concepts of the mother mold and the matrix take on ecofeminist significance: hollowness, void, and the maternal form become spaces in which life takes shape through vulnerability.

Drawing on dark ecological thought and mythological notions of transformation, the exhibition frames fertility as an existential capacity – the ability to remain receptive, to change, and to persist within uncertainty.

For neither artist does form function as an end result, but rather as a temporary state still taking shape. Transformation unfolds in two modes: one opens the world in its transhistorical vastness, the other in the sharpness of microprocesses and touch. This movement is at once cosmic and intimate, geological and bodily, forming a single mechanism – the axis of emergence and the wound.

This field of tension between the two artists cannot be separated from a broader worldview. Our contemporary world operates through vulnerability; survival is no longer guaranteed for any being or system. Developments in the philosophy of science, ecologically driven critique, and posthumanist thought have shifted our understanding of the world from a stable, legible stage to a layered, temporally uneven, and constantly transforming process. The world is no longer firm ground. It is an entangled network of life forms in which the human is not a self-evident centre, but one temporary assemblage among others. The works of Männa and Erikson enact this paradigm shift in practice: their shared lifeworld unfolds as a continuous event, its interior constantly stratifying.

Moving away from anthropocentric thinking, the wound is understood not as an injury, but as a creative moment of contact in which matter, body, and world meet and give one another new form and meaning. Imprint of Vulnerability does not frame disintegration as loss, but as a condition through which the world can continually reshape itself.

Myth as a Survival Skill

In Mari Männa’s practice, the Cosmic Egg and the Earth Mother function as generative principles: the world is at once vast like a starry sky, yet intimate like a shelter. Within a nature-cultural worldview, the human is no longer central but smaller than trees, birds, and lichens, encountering the world with a sense of wonder and awe. This is, of course, only one imagined future – but one in which we might arrive at the Symbiocene, an era of care and entanglement, where interspecies relations emphasise coexistence and mutual dependence. Within these imaginaries, hybrid mythological life forms emerge – post-human beings that transcend the boundaries of bodily matter and species.

Drawing on Finno-Ugric and pre-Christian ways of perceiving the world, reality is understood as continuously regenerative and cyclical. Life unfolds as a circulation in which a strong shell – outwardly betraying nothing of what takes place beneath – serves as a pause for breath, a protective layer beneath which an intense and invisible process of self-definition is at work. For the artist, who comes from the island of Saaremaa, a magical understanding of nature and access to an ancestral, inherited indigenous culture are interwoven with contemporary reflection. In her practice, the eternal and the temporary, ceaseless movement and apparent stillness, converge. The archetype of the Cosmic Egg found in Uralic and Finno-Ugric myths is linked to empowering rituals, where hatching marks a transition from one state to another and every ending carries the promise of a new beginning. From this emerges a mythical worldview that regards nature as sacred and conveys primordial life wisdom drawn from nature. In Männa’s work, this knowledge is anchored in the artisanal and slow processes through which the works are made.

Enveloping her forms in suggestive mythological narratives, the sculptor employs concrete casting and modelling techniques. Set against white surfaces, subtle transitions soften into pastel details, yet the overall impression is of forms that are eerily beautiful – raw and richly detailed – while remaining vibrantly intense and alive. A powerful gaze and directness are evident both in the depiction of nature and in a mode of thinking grounded in a single, central understanding: myth. In Männa’s work, the figure of the wisewoman emerges, as if the artist were taking destiny and power into her own hands, allowing an unrestrained, dreamlike presence to arise.

Männa’s forms do not look back to the past or seek to restore lost worlds. For the artist, shaping is a process of meaning-making: her forms, as physical signs, emerge through myths that persist in the collective consciousness, and carry a vital emotional and spiritual charge, particularly in times of crisis. Her works resonate like archaeological finds from the future. Within the sculptures, prehistoric mythology intertwines with speculative futures. This encounter is not linear but temporally displaced, as past and future press into one another. In this way, the works invite viewers to think in geological time – slowly, in layers, and beyond the scale of a human lifespan.

The Wound as a Condition, Care as a Strategy of Time

Maria Erikson’s practice is grounded not in representation, but in contact. Her work does not ask what to depict, but how something can become visible at all. A way of thinking rooted in printmaking shifts from the printing plate to the bodily and geological plane: the surface is no longer a neutral support, but a resistant, remembering body. In Erikson’s works, the wound does not signify rupture or injury, but a condition of origin through which an image, form, or trace can emerge. Only when a surface is opened, scraped, removed, or split does it become possible for something to endure.

Erikson’s thinking has been shaped through a long-term printmaking practice in which the medium itself has been a persistent question rather than a self-evident framework. Her studies in printmaking and work as a master printer fostered a deep engagement with technical processes, while simultaneously generating dissatisfaction with image-centred logic. The central question shifted from how to print an image more effectively to what printing means as a bodily and material activity. From this shift onward, Erikson became interested in the border zones of printmaking – moments when the printing surface, binder, and support no longer behave as expected, but begin to operate according to their own logic. For her, printmaking is no longer merely an image transferred onto paper, but a temporally layered field in which labour, waiting, care, and failure become inseparable from form.

This resonates with Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of empreinte, in which the imprint is not a representation but the result of contact between body and surface. The trace does not depict; it emerges through pressure, touch, and withdrawal.

In Erikson’s works, contact is not only mechanical but also temporal and ethical. The materials she uses – gum arabic, gauze, honey, and stone – are slow and bodily, resistant to rapid shaping. They demand presence, care, and waiting. For her, printmaking is not a technical tool but an attitude, in which the work is not a finished object but a condition of duration.

Care functions as a practical condition in Erikson’s practice. Here, care work does not signify softness or consolation, but sustained attentiveness to the states of materials – their drying, cracking, sagging, and hardening. If something is left undone, only the printable surface remains; if intervention is too forceful, the material’s own will is lost. Erikson’s work unfolds within this field of tension, where the artist does not dominate her subject but works alongside it. This relational perspective situates her practice within an ecofeminist framework, in which receptivity, care, and slow resistance take precedence over production and control.

From this perspective, fertility in Erikson’s practice is understood not as a biological or reproductive category, but as a receptivity to change. Rather than closing, the wound scars; rather than filling in, form remains partially hollow; memory cannot be fixed – it accumulates in layers. Erikson’s work offers neither redemption nor a narrative of healing, but instead invites a slowing down and a dwelling within this in-between state, where the world has not yet been fully assembled. Here, the delicate imprint does not signify weakness, but the possibility that something may endure without becoming fully petrified.

The Ethics of the Imprint

Männa engages with motifs drawn from the ritual of indigenous Finno-Ugric cyclical cosmology – disintegration and rebirth – while Erikson introduces a parallel trajectory: stone as memory, petrification as protection, and the scar as preservation. Through the interplay of these approaches, the exhibition takes shape as a shared model of the world, in which fertility signifies receptivity and the capacity for transformation. Imprint of Vulnerability places the viewer in a situation where fragility and delicacy become evidence of vitality, and the trace – a scar, a crack, a fragment – carries bodily memory forward.

The tension of the exhibition arises from its conception of time and the body. The future unfolds in layers and at varying speeds: at times freezing, at others growing slowly beneath a shell, and at times erupting through wounds and acts of emergence. Are we able to endure processes whose outcomes we cannot foresee? From this emerges an ethics of fragility and delicacy – a readiness to allow the world to remain incomplete, to let material respond, and for the body to function not as a product, but as a bearer of history.