by text Ariana Kruger and photos
by Evelyn Bencicova
Madelen Isa Lindgren (b. 1990, Fredrikstad, Norway) works with sculpture, developing material strategies for survival, care, and spiritual continuity. Growing up in a fishing family by the Norwegian coast, she spent her early summers at sea, while already building small, imagined homes in cupboards and corners.
Lindgren's practice is rooted in a spiritual understanding of matter as animate and relational. She believes that spirits move through both living and non-living forms alike — messengers carrying memory, grief, and wisdom across time and form. Within this framework, objects emerge as potential hosts. Looking back to earlier cosmologies, the artist reflects on how spirits were once welcomed into daily life as deities and guardians, inhabiting domestic forms and talismans.
Reflecting on mass production as an accumulation of hollow forms, Lindgren asks what it means to create forms capable of embodying spirit.
“I found comfort in how objects have been used as portals and sirens* to connect spirits with the human world. In response to my thoughts about hollow spaces, I wanted to create new shelters for these spirits, a safe place for them to inhabit and rest."
Through material transformation and imitation of natural structures, she creates forms resembling cocoons, shields, and tentacles, articulating temporary layers of primordial and cultural exile and defense. Metal, glass, and leather each carry specific symbolic meanings: metal as a spine, glass as an emotional vessel signifying fragility and transparency, and leather as a second skin, representing intimacy and protection.
Working consciously with symbols, Lindgren has gradually developed a distinct formal vocabulary. Certain shapes repeatedly appear in her sculptures, gradually forming her own symbolic language. As she attributes protective qualities to them, they begin to function as shields — elements within a self-constructed network of protection that extends across her practice.
“I’m drawn to the idea of material memory and transformation — how matter itself remembers, mutates, and teaches me about care and change.”
The artist is particularly attentive to moments of flux — the stretch before bloom and the shell before it breaks, moments where fragility and strength meet. Drawing from texts such as Poetics of Encryption, Vibrant Matter, Urpflanze, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and The Rites of Passage, Lindgren approaches making as a ritual. She repeats gestures such as hammering, bending, and heating, turning them into acts of invocation. Cycles of transition lie at the heart of her work.
Drawing on alchemical processes and ecological thought, she captures moments within transformation and solidifies them into sculptural form. Engaging with Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which urges recognition of nonhuman forces as active participants in political and material life, her work shifts between archaeological memory and imagined futures. It reflects on time, ecofeminist ideas, and the vitality of matter, exploring where traditional craft meets experimental making.
Every step of the sculptural process is part of a ritualistic gesture, requiring respect, attentiveness, and care for the materials. By inviting the material as a collaborator rather than a passive resource, Lindgren challenges established hierarchies between maker and matter and introduces contingency into the work. This exploration generates its own field of energy. Energy that moves from solid to fluid and back again, leaving traces and imprints within the sculpture. Her work opens passages between the material and the spiritual, understanding the bridging of worlds as an act of faith that functions as protection.
“There is an ephemeral sadness in my sculptures, a layer of grief for what has been lost, yet also a stretch of hope toward new transformations. The physical and spiritual cycles continue to orbit within my work.”
In recent reflections, she turns to the coin as a symbolic object: once a tactile carrier of land, divinity, and collective identity. Moving between pocket-sized relief and monumental order, the currency acts as an amulet, an instrument of control, and a vessel for belief. By reimagining everyday symbols such as sculptural bodies, Lindgren questions how value, vitality, and belonging circulate—and how matter might once again become a home for spirit.
* The term “siren” describes how objects communicate with one another, how they generate a language to which we can attune ourselves. Through this siren and the channeling between them, they form a network of meaning, a shared frequency that guides us.
written by Ariana Kruger
All photos by Evelyn Bencicova