Hilda Hellström The Monument

  • Hilda Hellstrom
  • Water Lamp 2009
  • Stone Table 2010
  • The Sausage Machine 2011
  • Sedimentation 2011/12
  • The Materiality of a Natural Disaster 2012
  • Sedimentation 2011/12

The Monument

This short film and miniature landscape tell a mythical tale of Wattens, the home town of Swarovski. A keen Google Earth traveller, Hilda Hellström created a fantastical record of her imagined story of local life after real and virtual trips to the company's HQ. She then transferred the digital topography of the Austrian mountains to a milling machine and carved its landscape from her own self-made stone. The Monument is a physical tribute to Hellström's ‘friends' in the Tyrolean mountains, intended to celebrate and commemorate craft in the digital age.

Hellström takes inspiration from the Dadaist and Romantic movements, which were both sceptical of reason in an irrational world. Like the Dadaists she incorporates elements of chance into her making processes, while also emphasising emotion above reason.

Hilda Hellström

Hilda Hellström is a Swedish designer with a background in fine art. A recent graduate of the Royal College of Art's Design Products MA, she originally studied in Barcelona and Copenhagen before gaining a BA in Product Design from Beckmans College of Design, Stockholm. Hellström explores the narratives contained within objects and is preoccupied with experiences that shock. The daughter of a psychoanalyst and a carpenter, she describes herself as an ‘analytic craftswoman'.