Ongoing & Upcoming
2025 |
Jan-Feb, group show, Stems x Zotto, Brussels, BE Feb, group show, Loyal, Los Angeles, CA, US Feb-Mar, duo show with Katia Lifshin, Andrea Festa, Rome, IT Mar-Apr, group show, Marc Biblioni, Madrid, ES Apr, residency, La Bibi, Palma, ES Apr, group show, Galleria Loisti, Helsinki, FI Jun-Jul, solo show, La Bibi, Palma, ES |
2026 | Apr-May, solo show, Marc Biblioni, Madrid, ES |

Saline Binds
duo show
Temnikova & Kasela
Tallinn, Estonia
25.10.2024–5.1.2025
text by Keiu Krikman
photography by Stanislav Stepashko

The exhibition Saline Binds brings together works by two Helsinki-based artists, Man Yau and Eetu Sihvonen. Although both artists are exhibiting works stemming from their individual and distinct practices, presenting very different artistic expressions, they also share a similar sensibility and a strong focus on material in their storytelling.
Man Yau’s work often takes a closer look at distinct cultural contexts and examines these through her own experience as a woman and a BIPOC artist. For example, her work addresses issues like exoticisation, the patriarchal gaze and the subsequent expectations of performativity. Yau counters these processes and resulting structures of power through creating artefacts that combine cultural analysis, personal experiences and are able to stand against stereotyping.
For Saline Binds, Yau has created a series of sculptures that become a convergence point for multiple and simultaneous cultural, social and individual identities – but also placing them in the lineage of art histories that have not been historically offered a central position. These include elements of an outfit – a cowboy hat made of glass, porcelain parts bound into a protective jacket, intricately patterned cast bronze chopine heels, and ceramic hunting elements. The items are extravagant, eclectic and performative – protective and empowering but ultimately heavy on the body of the wearer. The tension between the body and its covers is further made visible through colourful chinoiserie patterns, elements of intrusive hands and motifs of crying eyes and tears. For Yau, this carries the complexities of performativity and femme power.
Eetu Sihvonen’s work presents a strange world with a cast of peculiar characters – Bruegel-like scenes in surreal humour. Inspired by the utopia of Cockaigne, an imaginary world of ease and abundance that stood in opposition to the harshness of medieval peasant life filled with labour and scarcity. So, the world Sihvonen constructs through their artworks is not one of godly splendour or high-class luxury but rather hails from a more down-to-earth utopia, regardless of presenting elements of fantasy and wonder.
Wall pieces presented at Saline Binds add to Sihvonen’s world of oddities. Here the scenes are contained in drops of water – a single tear encompasses a whole world – held by wooden structures. The 3D printed tableaus include a delicate cast of characters, intricate patterns and architectural ornamentation, linking the works to the fantasy genre. Referencing a somewhat archaic world, the materials and techniques Sihvonen uses, are combined in a way that evokes both the past and a very contemporary mode of working – 3D printed objects stand alongside hand-carved pieces. This might make the viewer consider the role of an artisan, someone who makes with their hands and has expert knowledge – could a craftsman also mean a master of digital objects or is there a perceived hierarchy between the two? And what would a contemporary workers’ utopia look like for these tradesmen?
At a glance, the artistic practices of Yau and Sihvonen seem very different, however, they both are invested in similar sensibilities, themes or approaches. In Saline Binds, among these, abundance, focus on narrative and experimenting with material stand out.
Abundance, however, is not aspirational in itself for either of the artists – although they both have a rich visual and material language, that richness is in service or personal and cultural expression and narrative. From the times of William Morris, the idea of masterful and exquisite (and therefore luxurious) craft has been linked to questions of social class, availability and accessibility. In their work, too, Yau and Sihvonen think through material and view it as representative of distinct representation of cultural and social markers. And this, in turn, allows them to create playful narratives around the objects they have crafted, or leave the task to the viewer, left wondering about the experiences of the characters and creatures the works evoke. In the end though, at the convergence point of everything, stands the body not unlike our own – blood, sweat, tears and all – living and soiling itself and the material around it with its salty liquids, aspiring towards unbound horizons.




Mourning Dew III (”One gentle push more, perhaps?”), 2024
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
64 x 24 x 23 cm
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
64 x 24 x 23 cm



Mourning Dew I (”Ever upward, yet ne’er arrived”), 2024
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
80 x 26 x 23 cm



Mourning Dew II (*Wooden gears crack, water flows in a quiet rush*), 2024
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
73 x 20 x 17 cm
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
73 x 20 x 17 cm





Mourning Dew IV (”I watch but I dare not follow”), 2024
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
69 x 26 x 23 cm



Mourning Dew V (”Ahh… What’s left of me flows away”), 2024
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
90 x 28 x 23 cm
Oak wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, paraffin oil, dye
90 x 28 x 23 cm

Lacrimal Lake House
solo show
Gaa Gallery
Cologne, Germany
30.8.–2.11.2024
text by Jaakko Rintala
photography by Yvo Cho & Eetu Sihvonen

Lacrimal Lake House is an exploration into themes and motifs that are recognizable from Eetu Sihvonen’s previous work. Their work, as a whole, is an exercise in world-building, or perhaps more pertinently, exploration. As such, it opens a vast landscape, a topography if you will, of somewhere that is at once familiar and estranging. Certain topoi, such as the egg and the burnt ornamental furniture, are recurrent in Sihvonen’s work, yet the world that opens up is of a distant nature, as if covered by a soft veil that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to locate yourself in it, hence the estrangement.
This estranging quality can be connected to melancholy, a state in which the subject continues living in surroundings that are at once familiar but somehow altered, as if in ruins. Melancholy and ruination permeate the exhibition’s works, from the pale bluish purple/violet of the resin works to black char of the carved wood. Accordingly, this is the situation the viewer then finds themselves in, exploring an emotional landscape imbued with melancholy and pebbled with ruins.
However, there is also a sense of regeneration, present most germanely in the figure of the egg as well as the “salient dew drops”, tears, which ties into the name of the exhibition. In human anatomy, the lacrimal lake is where tears gather, and it is located in-between the eye and the eyelid. Both the egg and the lacrimal lake thus refer to resting, gestating, gathering strength, a state before hatching. Clarice Lispector writes: “The egg is a suspended thing. It has never landed. When it lands, it is not what has landed.” In a similar fashion, a tear is a suspended thing.
According to Gilles Deleuze the artwork presents to the viewer sensation which is experienced only by entering the artwork, and it is then felt in the body produced by the artwork. In this sense, the exhibition can be seen as a sort of a role-playing game wherein the viewer traverses the emotional landscape as a wanderer on a journey upon an unknown path, encountering different objects and characters.
One of these objects in the exhibition is a renginkaappi, a farmhand’s cabinet, which underscores the transient nature of this journey. Historically this cabinet was intended to hold all of the farmhand’s personal belongings for they knew not when they would be assigned to a new farm and would then have to uproot and locate to their new lodgings, carrying the cabinet on their back. A situation somewhat relatable to most, as explicated in the title of the 2002 album of the Finnish psychedelic folk artist Kuusumun Profeetta: Kukin kaappiaan selässään kantaa, directly translated as Each Carries a Cabinet on Their Back



Chimeclad Spire of the Shelled Echoes, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
210 x 70 x 40 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
210 x 70 x 40 cm


Have You Come to Be One With the Dew Drops? 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
70 x 20 x 25 cm



Constant of the Sacred Saline Dew Drops, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, acrylic paint, hardware
85 x 45 x 30 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, acrylic paint, hardware
85 x 45 x 30 cm


Everflow, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm


The Weeping Descent, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
90 x 30 x 30 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
90 x 30 x 30 cm


Dewkissers, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
60 x 40 x 8 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
60 x 40 x 8 cm

Slumbering Warden, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
60 x 20 x 25 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
60 x 20 x 25 cm


I Can’t Stay for Long, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm


The Sacred Drops... I mustn’t let them weep, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
55 x 20 x 25 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
55 x 20 x 25 cm

Sacred Saline Dew Drops
and Other High Jinks
Solstice Festival
Ruka, Finland
June 2024
7-part sculpture installation
Charred pine wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
Photography by Eetu Sihvonen, Felix Bardy, Dennis Konoi, Samuli Vienola
Ruka, Finland
June 2024
7-part sculpture installation
Charred pine wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
Photography by Eetu Sihvonen, Felix Bardy, Dennis Konoi, Samuli Vienola






























Log 1 �’s 74th Birthday Party
Featuring work by Eetu Sihvonen, Ilê Sartuzi & Arieh Frosh
Installation by Amelie Mckee and Melle Nieling
Plicnik Space Iniative
London, United Kingdom
6.4.–2.6.2024
The events in LOG 1 through 3 are based on the experiences of an unknown form, following the traces of a lost entity through spacetime, profiling its trajectory in the process. It has reconstructed this moment within its limited ability, piecing together fragments to form a whole.



Treasure Hiding, 2024
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye




For T, 2024
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
Dearworths





Dayrim (Dearworth Duo) II, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
32x23x10cm
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wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
32x23x10cm



Dayrim (Dearworth Duo) I, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm




Dayred II, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm



Dayred I, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm


Chime Flail, Bellow Shell
, 2024
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
103x30x22cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
103x30x22cm