SO MINT! HELENA LUNDAHL

Current Obsession: What story or idea does your graduation work explore, and why was it important for you to tell it now?

Helena Lundahl: This project investigates traditional Karelian spells and protective practices, originating in a region that belonged to Finland until the Second World War and has since become part of Russia. The project focuses especially on the connection of belief systems and material culture, reframing them through contemporary sculpture and craft. The work reimagines objects not as passive ornaments but as active agents, capable of carrying intentions, memories, and transformations.

The urgency to tell this story now comes from a desire to reconnect with inherited but often overlooked forms of knowledge, especially those belonging to women and rooted in the margins of dominant narratives. In a world that leans heavily on rationalism and control, this work returns to the intuitive, the symbolic, and the magical. It is an invitation to imagine belief as a form of resistance.

CO: Who or what has shaped your practice in unexpected ways?

HL: My maternal ancestors were among the reciters of traditional spells in 19th-century Karelia. This deeply personal connection turned abstract academic research into an embodied inquiry. Another unexpected influence has been the material itself: copper, used in electroforming, revealed uncontrollable and organic forms, shaping the aesthetic language of the work in surprising ways. Similarly, embroidery, often seen as decorative or domestic, offered a powerful method to revisit protective symbolism and gesture through stitching. These encounters with material and memory have transformed my practice into one of listening, uncovering, and responding, rather than controlling or designing.

CO: Does your work reflect or respond to a cultural context or issue that’s personal to you?

HL: My work responds to a cultural lineage of protective symbolism embedded in the Karelian and Finnish traditions, especially the ones practiced by women through spells and textiles. These cultural expressions were historically tied to survival, community, and the safeguarding of bodies, women’s bodies, within systems of control and threat. Revisiting these traditions is both a personal and political act, rooted in a desire to reclaim and reinterpret forms of knowledge that were silenced, spiritualised, or demonised.

The project also engages with the contemporary context in which belief systems, astrology, magic, ritual are resurging among younger generations. By tracing these continuities, the work reflects an interest to find grounding and agency in a fragmented world, where the lines between truth and fiction, belief and fact, have become increasingly unstable. It asks what role craft and ritual can play in navigating this uncertainty, and whether belief might offer a different kind of truth, one that is emotional, embodied, and resistant.