Elina Lundahl (b. 1987) is a Finnish maker and artist currently residing in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Behind the workshop, in the patch of woods, a depository of rusty paint and oil cans. Pieces of bent metal, metal in various stages of strange decomposition, bent and dented cylinders carrying faint, foreign logos taken over by the corrosion. The slope is dangerous, tangled wire and pallet ties can catch your ankle. Maybe you will step on a sharp scrap.

The car has been in the woods seemingly always. It sits upside down on a bed of decomposed needles and soft, green moss that is gently embracing it. It belongs to the forest now. It is an entity in a slow, decades-long process of complete departure from the human world. What is known becomes vague and blurred, soft at the edges of memory. Its departure awes me. I do not remove any part of it, it belongs to the earth.

You will find it is easy to stop existing in known time, and enter into soil time, earth-time. This time is patient, it is quiet and its only demands are circular. This time works in slow, ever-widening circles which perfect themselves without any aid, without anyone acknowledging. The trees and mosses progress without a need for the observer — I trust that this is true. It does not matter what I make of it.

The known world does not convince me. It seems irrational, arbitrary and often harsh. There is a parallel world, flickering just behind it. Several parallel timelines probably exist. A fear-time. Outside the house there is the earth-time. The raccoon dogs, the deer, the upside down car chassis, my grandfather’s dogs and me live in the earth-time. We are walking barefoot on the shaded dirt road, the hot sun behind the old spruce trees. We collect resin from the trees for the concrete mixer belt.