Health Hammer #

2026, Ø 9 × 25 cm - Ø 12 × 40 cm, Handwoven Jacquard weave fabric, wool and cotton; wood; filled with mugwort, cassia seeds, and lavender seeds.

Health Hammer begins from the idea that tools of protest serve a purpose while a movement is being formed, while monuments are often created afterward—to remember, to remind, and to tend to a wounded collective once the movement has slowed or disappeared from public view. The project proposes the health hammer as a portable monument: an object that carries fragments of events, struggles, and acts of resistance that cannot be publicly pronounced, mourned, or commemorated.

Resembling a self-defense weapon while functioning as a tool of self-care, the health hammer is derived from an everyday Chinese massage object. Through rhythmic tapping, it combines acupressure with herbal aromatherapy to stimulate the body and relieve tension. In the work, this ordinary gesture of massage becomes a form of remembrance. The hammer can be used on one’s own body or on another body, producing vibration, sound, and repetition. Through this embodied action, Health Hammer proposes care as a way of remaining in contact with histories that have been concealed, censored, or erased.

The hammers are wrapped in fragments cut from larger handwoven Jacquard textiles. These textiles encode images, poems, phrases, letters, and other traces of histories that have resisted institutional systems of forgetting. Once cut and transformed into the surface of the hammer, the woven archive becomes both decorative and functional: something held in the hand, moved across the body, and activated through touch.

Rather than locating memory in a fixed public monument, Health Hammer asks how remembrance might become portable, intimate, and bodily—carried through textile, scent, repetition, and acts of care.

Health Hammer, Installation View at Health Hammer, Solo Exhibition at Forum Box, Helsinki, Finland, 2026.