This body of work acts as a loving observation of our relationship to cultural heritage, including our reinterpretations and exploitation of it. Ancient motives have been used, copied, distorted, deveoped, and commodified as a staple aesthetic, and can be seen most notably during the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, classicist, neoclassicist and postmodern periods.

In the summer of 2020 the Greek government loosened their previously severe restrictions on scuba diving near archaeological sites and created underwater archeological theme parks to stimulate the economy after the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Underwater archeology and sunken cities have long been fodder for fantasies about lost utopian civilizations. Whilst researching the work of Frank Goodio, the world’s foremost underwater archeologist, the artist Hilda Hellström found press photos of the excavation of the ancient Egyptian port city of Heracleion. Moved by the way the divers were portrayed engaging with found artefacts, she describes the statues as seemingly animated by the enamoured touch after 2,000 years drenched in mud. This tender relationship to cultural artefacts extends to the museum and the way we think of, and deal with, artefacts today, regardless of their original value. As curator Michael Barrett at Stockholm’s Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities puts it, “the value of an object in the collection is entirely determined by the stories we like to tell.”

The act of historicization and artefact “discovery” is traditionally viewed as unimpeachable and elevated above the act of storytelling, but this is not always the case. In parks throughout Copenhagen, there are bronze statues of Greek gods donated by Carl Jacobsen, Danish patron of the arts and founder of the Carlsberg and Glyptoteket Museums. Made in the early 1900’s, the statues are German replicas of Roman copies of Greek originals. The Roman copies, however, had originally been discovered without limbs and head, and the reconstructions donated by Jacobsen are collages assembled by guesswork. They are free adaptations rather than faithful copies.

Throughout her practice the artist has used craft as a means of investigating the meaning of objects and how artefacts act as mythological signifiers of our cultural heritage. Hellström’s practice is built around combining old craft methods like scagliola, intarsia, bas-relief with contemporary materials and techniques, which in themselves are a manifestation of the historicizing gaze from a contemporary viewpoint. “Aesthetics of Emulation,” for example, is a vessel based on a marble Attic funeral lekythos from 400 BC that was 3D-scanned and cut out on a milling machine from a cast block. Each step of the process—scanning, casting, and cutting—added a layer of interpretation to the original.

Material research and the latent potential of materials are an integral part of the work. This is clearest in the works of intarsia, where large blocks of casting compound are cut into narrow slices, revealing their inner life. In the bas reliefs, there is a play between negative and positive form, presenting an invisible anti-shape of the clay originals. Throughout this body of work there is a careful balance between concealment and revelation, a tension between contemporary materials and traditional methods that reveals the ambiguity of narrative and the transformative presence of time.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand” is a famous line the poet William Blake wrote in 1803, which describes how even the smallest grain of sand can report about the material flows it has been through over the course of its life. From cosmic dust, to rock, to sand. 
 

The artwork sits in a three story atrium at the University Library of Stockholm, Sweden and tells us about diatoms, a silica-covered algae. The narrative starts by the bottom floor. Here, the viewer meets a block of stone with reliefs of diatoms. When diatoms die, they fall down on the ocean floor, where they eventually sediment into the porous rock called diatomite. Algae transforms into rock. If the viewer turns around the corner, they will notice that the block in fact isn't solid, but cast on a wooden construction. It creates the illusory effect of a set design, a way of emphasizing a material deconstruction that both attempts to break down and build up a conception of reality. 

On the second floor of the atrium the wooden construction becomes a framework for reliefs. A body pours a liquid into a mirror image, creating a figure of a closed circle and a flow.  
The Bodélé desert in central Africa, an ancient evaporated sea, consists of diatomite. Enduring winds brings dust from the porous rock over the Atlantic to the Amazon, a nutritious process which is shown to be a precondition for the survival of the rainforest. The microcosmos of the diatoms conspires with the macrocosmos of the winds in a natural cycle. 

By the top floor you will find a framed, enlarged diatom in clay.  

“In every world thousands of worlds are hidden”, wrote the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf in 1941 as a response to William Blake. The artwork encourages us to look for the hidden cycles that can be found around us. A type of nature mysticism that goes all the way back to the origin of Western philosophy and Heraclitus thought ‘panta rhei’ - everything flows.

January 9 - February 15, 2020 at Berg Gallery Stockholm.
Extract from exhibition text by Magdalena Rozenberg:

In Perceived Memory, Projected Future the spectator steps inside a space that evokes thoughts on our inner sensibility and the way reality can appear to us. It is a form of memory research combined with questions about the future: it is in the union of these two that Hellström sees the present. The chronological timeline is dissolved and the past, the present and the future are here working together and are given a shared space to coexist and interact with one another. This could be seen as a manifestation of Hellström’s idea that the world is in constant transformation with fluid boundaries. It is undoubtedly a fluid concept of reality that Hellström experiments with. Her focus around transformation is being expressed mainly through the use of transformative and malleable materials, making haphazardness an element in the formation of the pieces. Hellström challenges the idea of where a process begins and where it ends. The craft is built on timely procedures where controlled processes meet the unplanned, when a material converts from one form into another, from liquid to solid, or solid to liquid. She plays with our definitions of the present, of the past and of the future, of materiality, of crafts, and of what we usually see as universally absolute. Perceived Memory, Projected Future becomes a demonstration of how to be in this world, one that resists a linear narrative and elevates transformative materials to give them emotional and physical shape.

Combined bollard and bike-stand in white concrete commissioned by ArkDes, Museum of Architecture, Sweden. Later produced for the city of Stockholm's body of transport.
The form is generated through the use of an elastic mould, showcasing the materiality, volume and gravity of the casting compound.

August 8 - September 28, 2019 at Etage Projects Copenhagen
Extract from exhibition text by Nanna Balslev Strøjer

The exhibition title The Science of Imaginary Solutions is inspired by French writer Alfred Jarry’s (1873–1907) literary trope ‘pataphysics’ - a type of philosophy examining imaginary phenomena existing in a world beyond metaphysics. Originally meant as a canny mockery to the rapid growth of popularisation in the 19th century, Alfred Jarry assigned meaning to the intuitive and the irrational. Subsequently, both Dadaists and Surrealists found inspiration in the quasi-science and artists like Miró and Duchamps joined the group of practitioners praising the irrational, useless, unconscious and the power of the imaginary. In the same manner, pataphysics endows meaning to Hellström by providing a type of terminology to an artistic practice falling outside traditional categories of craft making. By dismantling the conventional categories of material and craft, Hellström has left tradition, and thereby definition. As she is developing new techniques based on the unplanned, creating new realities based on the factitious, pataphysics gives Hellström a vocabulary. 

Hellström explores the poetic and transformative capacities of materials through contrasting narratives and artistic methods. The process of creating, of manipulating and giving form to material, is a continuous confirmation of being and belonging in the world for Hellström. It is a physical and emotional insistence on her own existence, as an artist and living body. The Science of Imaginary Solutions is a demonstration of the energy, poetry and curiosity feeding her practice and visible in the many ways she casts and carves, makes and imagines. Always in process, and refusing to be defined, her works become beautiful hybrids existing in their own right, as imaginary solutions.

A four meter tall obelisk installed outside Kvibergskolan school in Gothenburg. The spine-like form is generated through the use of an elastic mould, juxtaposing the strict vertical shape with the unruly vertebraes, embodying the agency of the casting compound. The concrete structure has infused copper shavings that are slowly oxidizing, incorporating the notions of time and cycles into the work. The commission explores the many analogies the symbol of a spine contains. Commissioned by Göteborgs Lokalförvaltning. 

November 18, 2016 - January 21, 2017. The Plinth Project at Etage Projects Copenhagen

Monolith resembling a core sample or a diagram over Earth's crust. Inlays depicting different understandings about the creation of the world. 

A project built around the local legend of Blenda and conceived during Residency In Nature in Småland Sweden. Around the 11-1200s, a band of women from Värend seduced, tricked and killed an army of Danish invaders. After the killing they entered the lake of Åsnen to wash themselves from blood. Here, they are also said to perform fertility rites, a supposedly integral part of the lives of the local women at the time. The legend, invented by Petter Rudebeck in 1691, was long a part of serious history writing and many of the local place-names (f.ex. Blodberget, Blodviken, Skägglösa) allude to the legend. Myth has entered our everyday reality. As if the legend was materialized in the local matter, the two river sculptures are made of gault clay, sourced close to the location of the events. From the clay, two fleshy looking shapes were fired and sat bathing on the surface of the water. 

December 6, 2014 – January 6, 2015 at Gothenburg Museum of Art
About the award in Swedish

A commission for the crystal manufacturer Swarovski. Initially developed for an exhibition at the Design Museum London 2012. In 2014 a second edition was produced for Swarovski Wonder Chamber in Innsbruck. The sculpture depicts the topography of the Tyrollean mountains, where the Swarovski head-quarters are located. It was conceived using Google Earth imagery which was transferred into a 3D program and cut out in a cnc-router. The sculpture was accompanied by a film split into three screens. The film, a fictive narrative that vaguely portrays the origin of the sculpture, shows images from the Tyrollean mountains, a limestone quarry and a house interior. Director of photography Wai Ming Ng.

The graduation project The Materiality of a Natural Disaster from The Royal College of Art, is a project around a geo-specific, human-inflicted narrative transferred onto local matter. The project takes place a year after the Tohoku Daiichi power plant disaster in Japan, and is a collaboration with local rice farmer Naoto Matsumura, who was determined to stay in the evacuated area. From soil from his unusable rice fields, five muddy vessels with typologies hinting to the local produce, were created. The project's aim was to lead one’s thought to the mythological, to construct allegories to the devastating event. Although being loaded, the vessels did not contain radiation, since the soil was dug up from 40 cm below ground. A 12 minute documentary portraying Matsumura’s everyday life, accompanied the vessels in the exhibition.