Exhibitions & projects
"The sense of smell is the sense of memory.
Can you imagine the scent of your childhood forest on a late summer evening?
I lose my balance and my right foot rolls over apples, and I slip down the slope. Luckily, I had already passed the patch of stinging nettles."
At the center of "Balancing on Wild Apples with a Toolbox" is what remains of my old treehouse. In early 2018, I returned to my childhood area in Strömsberg, and by chance, I passed a cluster of four alders. Between these alders hung a couple of planks nailed up. Two years later, I decided to retrieve what was left of the treehouse, every piece of wood, every rusty nail. Now the decomposition process has slowed down, but slowly, slowly the fragments break down bit by bit, like a childhood memory."
In her works, Hillevi Cecilia Högström explores changes in various environments, often from a personal perspective. The landscape is at the center of an extensive research project, sometimes incorporating performative elements. It is deconstructed and then reconstructed in a new constellation that tells a story. The research work is often broad, time-consuming, and borders on obsession. With the help of personal memories of places and scientific hypotheses, she creates installations, often made from materials that symbolize the Scandinavian industry: steel and wood in combination with the glass display cases of museum pedagogy. Through her artistry, she seeks to understand the world we live in and how we change it.
Hillevi Cecilia Högström (b. 1994) grew up in Jönköping and holds a BFA from Iceland University of the Arts (2018) and an MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2022). Hillevi Cecilia Högström has participated in a number of exhibitions – including at the Malmö Art Academy, Jönköping County Museum, and several film screenings in, among others, Seoul and Utrecht.
