Heidi Ukkonen: One Fly Makes No Summer

A hedge trimmed into the form of a horned goat stands in a verdant garden, where one barefoot woman sweeps the leaves and another shapes a second work of topiary. One Fly Makes No Summer, a solo exhibition of paintings by the Swedish artist Heidi Ukkonen, invites us into a transitional space of shifting seasons and emotions. 

 

The show’s title is a translation of a Scandinavian saying (the equivalent of ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’), meaning that a small sign or one positive event does not guarantee a longer-lasting change. The use of ‘fly’ rather than ‘swallow’ doubles down on this caution, subtly suggesting that what appears vibrant or thriving is always on the edge of decay. In Ukkonen’s paintings, this plays out as an underlying sense of uncertainty and restlessness that is connected to broader shifts in the natural world. These scenes feel familiar yet sit just outside of reality, infused with both collective mythology and the artist’s personal dreams and memories.

 

Take, for instance, a quartet of portraits in which a female figure turns in a circle, mimicking the rotation of the earth, while around her the landscapes shift from winter through to summer. In each portrait, she appears half-dressed in elaborate outfits drawn from Saint Laurent’s seasonal collections, as if physically caught between one season and the next. There is a tongue-in-cheek humour here aimed not just at the fashion world but at media more generally, and at the pressure placed on individuals, especially women, to continually reinvent themselves in cycles that often anticipate – and fall out of sync – with the rhythms of the natural world. 

 

Growing up in Scandinavia, where daily life is shaped by shifting light and weather conditions, Ukkonen describes a particular sensitivity to the seasons that is linked to her emotional experience of the world. Across the exhibition, she uses colour to evoke specific moods and sensory experiences, from a basket overflowing with radiant, fresh produce to touches of luminescence in the flecks of yellow flowers in the goat’s foliage fur. Though filled with a sense of optimism and abundance, we also understand these to be fleeting moments frozen on the canvas. 

 

Rather than depicting the seasons as fixed or predictable states, Ukkonen imagines them as bridges between one moment and the next. In these in-between spaces, certainty dissolves and perception becomes heightened. In this way, One Fly Makes No Summer suggests that, like nature, we are caught in an ongoing process of transformation that brings with it both beauty and unease.