Helena Burman primarily works with sculpture, installations, video, sound, and performance.
In this solo exhibition, she revisits previous works and transforms them into new ones. The Eggshell Bowl (1998) and the photograph The Moon and the Airplane (2000) are explored alongside her latest works from 2022, where she worked with recycled transparent plastic
containers in The Milky Way (2021) and Cluster (2022).
In The Burning – The Encapsulated – The Forgotten, she journeys through past memories and explores both the brighter and darker aspects of life. Through memories, she examines the transformations brought about by the passage of time. She also investigates our consumption and exploitation of nature and their effects on a larger scale. A human life is but a brief breath compared to the life of the Earth.

In her works, Helena allows plastic and candle wax to interact in ways that both encapsulate and reveal. Plastic packaging, originally intended to protect and preserve, becomes molds where candle wax is poured and takes on a new form. Through this process, the industrially manufactured is transformed into something organic and alive—the candle wax solidifies, cracks, melts, and changes over time. In this way, her works carry an inherent sense of
temporality, where materials both preserve and destroy, protect and dissolve.

The ability of candle wax to undergo physical changes mirrors the fragility and transience of life, while the permanence of plastic evokes thoughts about the traces we leave behind. By casting in the negative forms of plastic, sculptures emerge where the void left by the discarded becomes the artwork itself—a space for memories, shadows, and the passage of time.

When revisiting older works, such as the sculpture The Eggshell Bowl, she alters its material composition by casting it in candle wax. Through this choice of material, the interpretation of the bowl changes—from a delicate eggshell symbolizing birth and fragility to candle wax, which carries light until it evaporates into nothingness. In the photograph The Moon and the Airplane, she introduces a new piece, The Earth and the Branches, and in the encounter
between the two photographs, a duality arises between sky and earth, between light and darkness.

The choice of candle wax as a material also connects to science. The molecular structure of plastic, composed of hydrocarbon atoms formed by ancient plants and organisms, becomes a bridge between the human and the cosmic. The volatility of candle wax reminds us of the relentless passage of time.

But it is not only the scientific and symbolic qualities of the materials that drive Helena. It is also the eternal question of where we stand in the world—between the solid and the ephemeral, between memory and oblivion, between doubt and hope. Through candle wax sculptures, images, sound, and moving images, she creates an experience where the viewer moves between the measurable and the intangible—between the precision of science and the openness of poetry.