Matrix

Maria Erikson approaches landscape as a matrix: a fissure becomes an active surface that receives pressure, retains warmth, and records contact. The body does not pose, but seeks a momentary merging with the geological wound, as if in search of protection and belonging. As the figure disappears, what remains is a void – a crack that seems only recently inhabited. In this way, attention shifts from image to trace: rather than narrative or figure, what matters is the encounter through which form temporarily comes into being.

The work resonates with the body imprints and landscape-embedded silhouettes of Ana Mendieta, where presence is simultaneously visible and absent. For Erikson, petrification does not signify an end, but a slowing down. The motif of petrification that recurs in her work is neither stasis nor death; on the contrary, stone functions as a bearer of memory. This perspective also reframes Northern European and Nordic myths of women who flee into the mountains in search of protection and turn to stone – not as punishment, but as a form of shelter and preservation.