002 → Huldrafjall
“Monsters are also our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return.”
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture
The huldra, also called the tallemaja or uldda, is a category of monster present in Scandinavian mythology and folklore, commonly understood as feminine yet nonhuman – a kind of giant-woman whose central facet is deception. Shapechanging, most often into the form of an attractive younger woman, the huldra are yet limited in their aims of toying with, kidnapping, or murdering unsuspecting men by their tails, which persist through the guise of humanity, unable to be hidden by magical means.
Checking for tails and other physical deviations from femininity, then, becomes a measure of women’s capacity for humanity or deception, and reveals the loci of gendered anxieties that the monster has come to represent. Subterfuge and ruptures in corporeal expectation of femininity are central to patriarchal conceptions of transgender women, a link that becomes extremely poignant when considering the prevalence of monsterization as a mechanism for policing gendered bounds.
Transgender women are made into monsters for the same reason as huldra – as a warning to all that to transgress is to become dangerous, to forfeit humanity.
In playing with the forms and connotations of monstered images, the associations between the huldra and transfemininity become a generative space for interrogating both the ways in which the monster, and by extension (trans) women are dehumanized and degendered and the ways in which those images can be reclaimed and repurposed.
The two halves of this project mirror these dual questions: the lithographs present dominant images about the monster and their roots in patriarchal fears, while the paintings aim to represent the huldra in more expansive landscapes unbound from the gendered expectations which initially produced her as a monstrosity.
The six lithographs draw on traditions of folkloric art from Scandinavia, including work by Theodor Kittelsen, Edvard Munch, and Elsa Beskow. In centering the monsters, rather than their potential victims, the collection of prints attempts to deconstruct and make visible the logic of transmisogyny, a logic that insists that the duplicitous woman-creature of social nightmare is not a person to whom empathy should be extended, is not a person with interiority, is not a person at all.
The seven paintings, done in oil on shaped, custom-built canvases, break this literal and metaphorical framing of feminine monstrosity. Imagined landscapes, interpreted through the lens of Scandinavian magical realism, place the huldra not as the central figure of a totalizing narrative that overdetermines her place in the moral schema of the cosmology but as one piece in a larger, heightened ecosystem. Corporeal elements in the mountains, rivers, valleys, and skies draw closer the themes of inhumanity, the body, and denigration that structure comparisons between femininity and the environment in other contexts. The omnipresence of the body in the features of the land echoes not only the mythological connection between giants and topography (hill giants, mountain giants, forest giants, etc.) but also suggest that it is one’s physical environment, alongside social fears, that produce the monster. No matter which corner of the realm, the landscape forms the body of the huldra – she always returns.
Paintings
Oil on canvas.
Ulddaidvarrí -- a mountain in Saami lands whose name means ‘mountain of the uldda’ (the Saami name for huldra)
Prints
Bergtagning (Mountain-taking), 2024. Lithograph on paper.
Bergtagning and Bærtagning refer playfully to the abductions of the huldra.
.. Tungl-skin mødherne (Moonlight, mother's kin), 2024. Lithograph on paper. Bærtagning (Berry-taking), 2024. Lithograph on paper. Æ var hon angan illrar brúðar (To the delight of evil women everywhere), 2024. Lithograph on paper. Tallemaja sóllys (Maja of the pines, sunlit), 2024. Lithograph on paper.
Tallemaja is a Swedish term for huldra. Gýgrmaja månelys (Maja the giantess, moonlit), 2024. Lithograph on paper.
The huldra were said to change size as well as shape.
Bergtagning and Bærtagning refer playfully to the abductions of the huldra.
..
Tallemaja is a Swedish term for huldra.
The huldra were said to change size as well as shape.