20.3.–10.5.2026

In her Hard Shoulders exhibition, Maija Fox addresses the relationship between our culture, labour, and the individual. Her large sculptural installation is mainly constructed out of aluminium and steel and is an interaction with the gallery space and its architectural elements. Fox has been inspired by Finland’s Highway 4 and, more precisely, by a specific motorway bridge that stands in a marsh. Hard Shoulders refers to the motorway verges or breakdown lanes intended for stopping in an emergency. With this title, Fox brings up an existing emergency situation in our society, where the pace and pressure of advances in our surroundings create an ever-growing sense of unease and hopelessness on a personal, but also on a collective, level. She opens out our narrow field of vision to reveal an emptiness that moves in parallel with us on the margins. With her large-scale, technically challenging installation, she urges us to find an entry point to a sideways movement into a sense of security and enveloping calm.

Fox’s emphatically material-based art occupies the zone where humans and nature meet. In her art we can see traces of agriculture and heavy industry, both of which are directly rooted in Fox’s own upbringing in the countryside. She incorporates different elements from this setting, including tools, machinery, and structures with which human beings at work interact and influence their environment. Metals are a key, recurring material that Fox reworks using various techniques. She has developed her own poetic form language, in which she makes open-minded, creative use of the techniques and methods of the artisan, engineer, and artist. She combines various familiar mechanisms and structures, producing something that is evidently intended to elicit new functions and even to attain dreamlike states.

The bridge is something of a symbol of the engineer’s art — it combines civic construction with good infrastructure planning that not only sustains but also lays the foundation for continued growth. A bridge reduces distances and eases our movement across difficult terrain and “inhospitable” landscapes. In Hard Shoulders, Fox brings together two worlds and rhythms: above, the human being’s energy-craving, accelerating forward motion; below, the stillness of the swamp, where time thickens and the restless pace overhead begins to recede. We can see here our own drive to optimise, to streamline, and our ability to reshape the landscape and to exploit the resources contained in it.

Fox’s installation still seems to point to a coincidence — that Hard Shoulders simultaneously carries a silence. Traffic on the asphalt road, the machines on the construction site, and the machinery in the factories have come to a standstill for a moment. She tentatively steers our gaze to one side, toward the ranunculus flowers and other wetland plants cast in aluminium. She awakens our senses to see the marsh that surrounds the entire construction.

Rosehip bushes stand bleached by exhaust fumes, while velvety mullein presses upward between the margins of the road. Like the coming and going of memories, fragments of tear plate and orange peel appear between the road and the swamp.

The flower of a white water-crowfoot rests on the water, while the rest of the plant reaches down and clings to a world beneath the surface. This fragile biotope and its slow processes become a manifestation of an existence outside the system.

Like thickets and climbing plants, the interknitted metal wire grows upward and, like a sturdy weed, penetrates the hard surface of the asphalt, becoming part of the road’s painted centre line. In the pockets of the knitting lie worn, empty key chains — memories of previous entries and of keys that once opened doors and gates, and which once started machines. This textile dimension of the work is a break and a shift away from the monumental and robust that is forever seen as development and progress. These small intertwined fibres embody a different way of thinking based on responsiveness, care, and warmth.

The colossal construction becomes a lesson, a basis and fuel for something small to slowly and patiently grow into something that, we hope, will give us a sense of community, hope, and courage.

-Markus Åström
Curator

Maija Fox (b. 1998) lives and works in Helsinki. She graduated in 2022 with an MFA from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. In 2019, she had gained a BFA in Sculpture & Environmental Art from The Glasgow School of Art and, in 2018, a BFA in Sculpture & Spatial Practice from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Selected exhibitions: 2026, duo show with Bianca Hlywa, at Kohta, Helsinki; 2025, A base of a crane, solo exhibition, at Sculptor, Helsinki; 2024, On animated architecture, group exhibition, at Soft Power, Berlin; A Maple Wingnut; with lineage it lands, at St Chads, London; Kotibileet, group exhibition, at SIC, Helsinki; Klosetti duo exhibition with Jade Kallio, at Titanik, Turku; 2023, This Coming Together, group exhibition, at Kuva Tila, Helsinki; and, 2022, Wip, collaborative exhibition together with Man Yau and Vesa Rahikainen, at Outo Olo, Helsinki. Forthcoming in 2026, solo exhibition at OUTPOST, Norwich, UK. Fox’s art is in the Finnish National Gallery’s collections. Since 2024, she has held a three-year working grant from Kone Foundation.