5-29 June

The gallery’s spring season concludes with The Spider Learned to Count, Heini Aho‘s insightful, witty and wise show in which she plays with everyday objects scaled up to monumental proportions and examines seemingly insignificant things. A watercolour palette is enlarged to colossal size, while bronze tea bags await their user in a cup, looking strikingly authentic. Aho finds endless potential in everyday objects. In her video work Individually Wrapped, a car tyre slowly rolls over a sequence of wrapped, bottled and bagged packages that pop, burst and flatten before our eyes.

A large bronze sculpture, Holy Tip, rests on a glass surface. Its amount cannot be determined, as the pattern is a composite of two different banknotes and the tip is thus not valid currency. Nearby, a sculptural duo from the series Small Sculptures That Tell Us Something Big Was Here reclines on a pedestal. Titled Half-Eaten, it features a cast-aluminium watermelon and lemon, both sliced in half, with foil covering the cut surfaces.

In the exhibition’s title piece, The Spider Learned to Count, a spider spins its web while counting wooden abacus beads, carrots cast in candle wax, and pale bronze pea pods. The spider – a creature most humble and often shunned – can travel unnoticed on your shoulder or in your bag. Its web is famously delicate yet strong. Aho’s version is forged from steel.

Heini Aho’s work is marked by a sensitive approach to materials. Her process remains open, embracing materials like candle wax, bronze, brass or concrete. These choices incorporate important possibilities: one material never excludes another, rather, they open up mutual potentialities, endowing Aho’s work with conceptual richness.

A huge price tag on the floor evokes a sense of both gain and loss. Made from brass and copper, Eternal Discount reflects the notions of value as well as trash – the price tag being the first thing removed and discarded after a purchase.

In the downstairs space, we encounter the soles of enormous shoes, rubbery and elastic in appearance yet made of solid stone. Heini Aho’s scale of being and living is boundless. These works imitating treads are an exploration of the meaning of scale itself. Lodged in the grooves are seemingly meaningless objects such as matches, twigs, and squashed chewing gum, all cast in tin. It is this play with different scales that is the secret of the ingenuity of Aho’s art.There is no such thing as trash. There is only a way of relating to things.

– Ulla-Maija Pitkänen

Acknowledgements: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Niilo Helander Foundation, AVEK

Heini Aho (b. 1979) lives and works in Turku, Finland. She graduated from the Turku Arts Academy in 2003 and from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. Her most recent solo exhibitions include shows at WAM at the Kilta Gallery of Turku City Art Museum, Turku (2025); Galleria Sinne, Helsinki (2022); Galerie Anhava (2020); and Galleri Fikka, Porvoo (2020). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2022–2023); Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany (2022); Kunsthalle Helsinki (2022); and Harris Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022). Her public artworks can be seen at Sompasaari and the Finnish–Russian School in Helsinki, and at the Lighthouse hospital in Turku. In 2016, Aho was awarded the Finnish art Society’s William Thuring Prize.