Helena Lund Ek has devoted the last four years of her artistic career to the relationship between pregnancy and painting. In the exhibition at Luleå Konsthall, we encounter the artist’s multi-year pregnancy project in which she explores the existential, the transcendental, the corporeal and existing as a pregnant woman in a society. The abstract and wordless are just as permissible as the imaginative and loud. The sublime and spiritual alongside the defiant and political. Being pregnant is always precisely political, different in different times and places, but society and those in power have always had opinions on and felt empowered to set the framework and stipulate the morality and living conditions for the life of the pregnant woman.
During her work, she has used the physical and spiritual experiences as tools and materials for three series of works that examine aspects of pregnancy and that move in a space where this human condition is allowed to merge with the painting process. Three series about pregnancy and art that are shown in each exhibition hall at Konsthallen.
–Text by Paulina Sokolow
