ACTIVATED BY LIGHT
Three materials, one process. Each disperses differently.
The tiles on show have been subjected to sandblasting, a process that accelerates what time does slowly. The abrasion strips back the surface, revealing how different materials yield at different rates: glass becomes thinner and thinner with each stroke, growing more transparent as it weakens; ceramics, seemingly solid, remains porous and receptive; iron holds its ground longest.
Among them, clay occupies a particular position. Unlike metal, which can be melted down and reborn, fired clay cannot return. It has no second life as raw material. Once transformed by heat, it exists only as what it is, accumulating damage, holding memory, moving in one direction only. Ceramic is perhaps the most honest of materials: irreversible in the truest sense.
Sandblasting does not destroy these objects so much as hasten their becoming, pushing each material further along a path it was already on. Corrosion is not an ending, it is a process that was always already underway.
Maia Hellman is a Swedish-Portuguese maker working across ceramics, metal, and glass. She holds a BFA in Metal Art from the University of Gothenburg and is currently completing a master’s degree in Craft Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her artistic practice focuses on moments when materials reveal their true nature through wear, time, and processes of transformation. Influenced by both Scandinavian and Baltic contexts, her work is grounded in careful observation and hands-on making.
__________________________________
FOLDS AND TRACES
The jewellery in the exhibition FOLDS AND TRACES is shaped through folding, marking, and the application of heat, both working methods that generate surface relief and structure. Departing from strict repetition, the emphasis shifts toward the material’s own response within the process of making. The exhibition considers the point at which control meets chance, and how their interplay gives rise to form. The works are not cast, but folded and formed entirely by hand.
Anne Reinberg is an Estonian jewellery artist. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2005 with a BA in jewellery and blacksmithing. With an earlier background in computer graphics, she has been exhibiting since 1996. Her work combines silver, wood, and crystals, revealing the patterns embedded in natural structures and the mathematical principles that shape them. Reinberg is a member of the Estonian Metal Artists’ Association.
Exhibitions in A-Galerii are supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment
