SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery is presenting Opposite Knots, Henna Vainio’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together new ceramic word stacks, woven forms, and sculptural wall constructions that transform language into fragile, interdependent structures. These forms fold, trap, and contradict themselves much as words and specific phrases do in everyday life.
Vainio’s recent work centers on language as a physical and political material. Words such as win, no, anti-age, and tender change are stacked, repeated, and woven into dense sculptural knots in which meaning becomes unstable. As letters accumulate, they begin to slip away from their original messages, becoming objects in their own right. In these works, language no longer moves forward in a straight line but loops back on itself, creating systems where opposites are embedded within each other and where beginning and end collapse into the same space.
With the inherent deception of language in mind, Vainio takes words and turns them into shapes which become indecipherable forms embodying the weight of their original meaning. In the pieces containing “Win”, a word initially chosen for its rigid linearity, the letters begin to entrap itself through repetition, suggesting an impossible world in which winning exists without the possibility of losing.
Flattened against the gallery walls, “You/Me”, “Give/Take”, “More/Less”, words have been recently floating in the artist’s mind, intersect and interloop subtly meditating on the rampant contradictions in the current political climate. The “No Net” anchors the exhibition in the center wall as the repeated word “No” droops and drips onto itself at times disguised as the word “On.” This work functions as both a physical and symbolic net as we often find ourselves torn between wanting to say “No” but feeling the pressure of always needing to be “On.”
Other sculptures extend this instability into more complex forms. The icy blue Anti-Age pyramid reflects a cultural fixation on youth that also implies a rejection of history, knowledge, and experience. Shaped like a pyramid or a cultic monument, the structure becomes both seductive and awkward, collapsing under the weight of its own promise. In the black, spiraling Tender Change, the repeated phrase can refer equally to money or to something emotionally fragile, its meaning stretched until it dissolves into a restless, scribbled knot.
Across the exhibition, Vainio treats words as a material to be woven, stacked, and stressed much like clay. Working in a language that is not her first, she is acutely aware of how English hides contradictions, silent letters, and double meanings, allowing ideas to deceive as easily as they communicate. Her ceramic forms dry quickly and demand precision, mirroring the difficulty of holding unstable language together long enough to make it say something at all.
In a political and cultural moment defined by zero-sum thinking, where losing is no longer an option and certainty is prized over humility, Vainio’s sculptures give form to language caught in its own traps. These tightly wound, delicate objects do not offer clear messages so much as they expose how meaning is built, undone, and knotted together.
Henna Vainio (Finland, b.1981) earned her MFA from The Slade School of Art, London, and her BFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include As If - The Light, 1599fdT, San Francisco (2024); Quantum Foam, Casemore Gallery (2023); Ben Peterson - Henna Vainio, 1599fdT, Mill Valley (2023); Hardstep, Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2019) and More Life, Ratio 3, San Francisco (2018). She has also participated in a number of group shows in the UK, Finland and Germany.
