Helena Lehtinen is often described as a collector, picking up things she later uses in her jewellery. ‘Collecting, seeing, processing, doing. Fragments, memories, finding the meaning in the meaninglessness’, she says of her work.  Shape, colour and surface drive her choices, but her finds are just ordinary, everyday things: twigs, yarn, ribbon, stones. Materials are carefully chosen, selected for the history they hold and the memories they evoke. 

Born in Lahti in 1952, Helena studied at Lahti Goldsmith School and then at the University of Industrial Arts Helsinki and Lahti Polytechnic. A founding member of the Finnish contemporary jewellery group Hibernate, her work is exhibited internationally and held in collections including the Marzee Collection, the Design Museum in Helsinki, the Lars and Helena Pahlman Collection, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg and Die Neue Sammlung in Munich. In 2013 she was awarded the Herbert Hoffman Prize and was named Jewellery Artist of the Year by the Finnish Jewellery Art Association in 2015.