Jane Hughes & Mari Mäkiö
Crossing paths
11 December 2025 – 8 January 2026
Huuto II
The exhibition interlaces the practices of Mari Mäkiö and Jane Hughes into a constellation of journeys that move from the close-up to the vast—drawing on the hidden bark beetles of Finnish forests and fossil traces preserved in Irish Carboniferous limestone.
Both artists are drawn to what sits just beyond ordinary sight. Mäkiö studies and translates the pathways carved by bark beetles into precise works on paper, clay and textile, turning their trackwork into a kind of concrete poetry. Hughes, by contrast, follows the vestiges of deep time and the quiet shifts of light as night falls; in her paintings, fossil forms and imprints of decay become fictional figures roaming through layered colour-scapes.
Together their works offer paired vantage points: the intimate and the expansive. While Mäkiö maps the beetles’ intricate routes with clarity, Hughes assembles mirage-like collages and paintings where time, colour, and reference accumulate. Seen side by side, these approaches open a conversation about attention—how looking closely and thinking broadly can reveal structures of life and history that are usually overlooked.
Jane Hughes works explore the aesthetics of decay and displacement through ruins and disintegrating memories. Ghosts, bones, and fossils permeate the work. A recurring arch motif, drawn from fossils, threads across the paintings as a quiet link. In her work the painted landscape functions as an entry point for a shared perspective—like a filmic pause when the camera pans away, giving a moment to absorb and let things settle. Like Mäkiö, her interest is in what lies beneath the surface, and in our complex histories—personal, social, and of place, especially in seemingly peripheral locations.
Mari Mäkiö’s installation combines traces and imprints from materials collected in the forest. Her process consists of multiple steps. She extracts colour from the bark of different trees to dye recycled textiles and uses plant printing technique, using pieces of beetle-carved bark onto cloth. The textile elements are then assembled into a patchwork design. On Japanese paper, her intricate ink-rubbing prints reproduce tree trunks and branches carved by bark beetles, using the traditional Japanese Takuhon printing method. The ceramic pieces echo the beetles’ printed patterns. At the end of the process, Mäkiö returns the gathered wood to the forest to continue its cycle of decay.
The mind at three miles an hour, Urban Walk
Meeting point Oodi Library, 11am Sa 13.12.2025
In conjunction with the exhibition on Saturday 13th of December the artists invite you to join them on an urban walk. We will meet at the side entrance of Oodi Library at 11 am. We stroll by the water over the new bridge to Galleria Huuto. Followed by an informal tea and reading event with some excerpts from Wanderlust: A history of walking by Rebecca Solnit (2001).
