Heli Haav

• Lilith
• Tutor: Anu Vahtra
• recycled textile installation; animated photo collage

„Lilith“ draws from Carl Gustav Jung’s individuation process theory, that is also known as shadow work, deriving from the shadow archetype. The process calls people to make their repressed parts of the psyche conscious.

Lilith was Adam’s first wife who was sent away from paradise. Underworld, barren wasteland, kingdom of demons, or just hell – all of these words are used to describe the place where Lilith went. The word “shadow” fits into this list just as well. 

Plants mostly start their earthly growing journey in the darkness. Whether it’s a bud of a leaf or a flower, it usually looks like it’s compressed or tightly packed together, making it seem tough, full of vitality, and at the same time vulnerable and soft. It’s like an alchemical process of becoming, while carrying the mothering embrace of the darkness of the soil, and the unconscious that has been made conscious.

Our primordial mother is always there to catch us. We really have nowhere to fall.

The sentences on the installation are borrowed from the following songs:

“There’s the thing with bruises: if they are good you would prefer them to hold on”

Bone Marrow Stem Cell by Easter

“You said what’s wrong

I said nothing

no things

really

sometimes

some things”

Shy by Hannah Diamond

“I didn’t mean to rearrange and change the night sky to daylight”

Toxic Toxic by Kadiata

“The pain will be

You know what the pain is”

U an I by Olukara