May Peace Find Me on Both Sides of Sleep 

The light switch in my kitchen has been stuck for a while. It’s not on, it’s not off either. If you move it slightly a certain way, the lightbulb will flicker on. You have to delicately place a piece of tape on it to have it stay in the right position. I screwed open the plastic lid surrounding the switch to see if there was something stuck inside of the mechanical parts, but there was nothing. I didn’t dare to touch the wiring. I thought of my skull that had been meticulously opened, broken into five pieces, moved around and then screwed back together. We waited for the soft parts to become bone again and for something to change. Nothing changed. It must be the wiring. 

Elina Heilanen’s MA collection explores the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness. Inspired by the designer’s personal encounters with sleep disorders, the work investigates states of in-betweenness: sleepwalking, paralysis, deprivation, and the societal discomfort evoked by daytime rest. The collection imagines a character who carries the bed with them. Through fabric, form, and texture, sleep becomes a part of their outward expression.

“We’ve had this joke for years, saying the collection was revealed to me in a dream,” she says. “But like with all jokes, there’s a serious concept hidden in there.”

A serious material concept about rest, regulation, and resisting.

The collection references the shapes of bedding, such as pillowcases, duvets, and bedsheets, reimagining them into garments with considered structure and form. Materials were the starting point of the creative process for Heilanen. She created hand-drawn motifs that were transferred onto textiles using slow, analogue processes that require working in darkness. The final image is only revealed once the lights return, echoing parasomnias. This method of working — tactile, imprecise, and instinctive — mirrors the collection’s central concern: what happens in the moments we don’t fully control?

”I then further developed some of these prints into felted woven fabrics, leather engravings and other printed textiles present in the collection”, Heilanen says.

Heilanen approaches making as a way of thinking not just about sleep, but through it. The collection process is shaped by a personal relationship to rest, rhythm, and interruption, leading her to methods that welcome coincidence and intuition. Rather than forcing a concept onto the material, she looked for techniques that resonate with the themes at hand.

Elina Heilanen

elina.heilanen@aalto.fi

+358 503053951

Instagram @elinaheilanen