The work

About the work.

A part of Maahiset series MAAHISET There was once a belief in the Karelian villages that another people lived beneath the earth. Small in stature yet extraordinarily strong, these beings inhabited caves, crevices and deep fissures in the ground. At night, they would emerge into the world above, stealing chickens and, as some stories tell, even children. They were known as the Maahiset . Their stories were passed down through generations, and encounters with them were recounted not as fairy tales, but as events belonging to lived reality. These stories also survived through family narratives. As a child, I listened to my grandmother recount tales she had heard from her own mother. In this way, ancient folklore became part of a childhood world where the boundary between imagination and reality remained blurred. Dark forests, fissures in the earth and the fading light of summer evenings became places where an encounter with the Maahiset seemed entirely possible. This series of works explores that elusive threshold — where childhood fear, curiosity and the allure of the unknown converge. The Maahiset appear in the twilight of summer nights, when familiar landscapes begin to lose their contours and darkness seems to conceal more than it reveals. Their figures barely emerge from their surroundings, as though they belong to the landscape far more than they do to the human gaze. The Maahiset are neither monsters nor fantastical beings intruding upon the human world. Perhaps the opposite is true: it is humanity that has entered a world to which it never truly belonged. They are the ancient inhabitants of the earth, its unseen keepers, whose existence does not depend on human belief or on our ability to perceive them. In this series, folklore becomes a way of reaching towards another reality, one preserved in the memory of generations and in nature itself. Perhaps the Maahiset never disappeared. Perhaps people simply forgot how to notice them. And while humanity sleeps, beneath the earth, in the crevices of the forest and in the depths of the night, a life far older than our own continues.

Details

Size

100 x 70 x 2 cm

Rarity

Unique work

Medium

acrylic on canvas

Year

2026