Time To Listen

In his autobiography *I Confess I Have Lived*, Pablo Neruda writes: “The best thing I ever collected in my life was my shells. Their wonderful shapes utterly enchanted me: the moon-white purity of rare porcelain combined with a great variety of forms—adapted, bizarre, functional.” It is worth noting that Sigmund Freud also enjoyed collecting shells, and that Carl G. Jung said in one of his lectures that all our objects of love “tend to pull our ego out of its comfortable shell.”
Many of us learned as children that you can hear the sound of the sea when you press a shell to your ear. So something happens right there, between two shells—the ear and the sea shell. A condensation—a meeting—an expectation awakens. The ability to carry within oneself the memory of a sound—a wave. In truth, what one hears in the shell is an external sound that echoes within the shell’s curvature.
The human inner ear is anatomically named after the Greek word for snail, “cochlea,” due to its resemblance. The cochlea itself is pea-sized, filled with water, and functions as a sound transducer. Its main function is to convert mechanical movements (vibrations) into electrical nerve signals, which the brain then interprets. It is we who fill the shell with sound—listen closely, and you will hear it!

Helena Wikström, born in 1964, lives and works in Umeå in northern Sweden. She primarily creates installations that combine film, photography, sound, and sculpture, often in collaboration with other artists, musicians, and filmmakers. In April 2026, she will participate in the MQ Artists-in-Residence program.