Crusts

The platform holds two large-scale forms that resemble oversized eggshells. They may also be seen as organisms whose petrified shells protect their interiors. Inside the shells are eggs whose forms recall a brain or a walnut. Here, the old and the new are not clearly separated: the shell that once served as a protective layer has become a sign of transition. Emergence into the world is neither abrupt nor final, but unfolds slowly as the shell gradually crumbles.
Männa’s world-space carries the viewer into a state before names, when life and spirit are still taking shape. The fossils appear to have petrified at a moment before a species had defined itself – as if suspended in time, remaining open to change and otherness.
The work draws on Finno-Ugric creation myths in which the world is born through hatching. A waterbird searching for a nesting place on the primordial sea, and a world unfolding from an egg, give rise to an image of a layered, continuously transforming origin. This is not a restoration of the past, but a slow process of world-making that continues into the present. The forms appear both archaic and futuristic – not as finished shapes, but as events still in search of their form.