Nea Haasnoot

LUCKY CHARMS

This is a collection of lucky charms. Each object reflects the sentimentality between them and their unknown user, discussing emotional value as a factor in sustainability. This collection combines and rearranges different contexts. The installation centres on materiality, evoking the sense of a missing presence. The timeline for the scene is set by reprocessing the 1960s, when plastic and disposable products broke through and clothes settled as consumer goods. Haasnoot explores material as a measure of meaning through Finnish coexistence with nature, saturated with human intervention and industrial aesthetics.

Descriptive of the things in Nea Haasnoot’s body of objects, Onnenkalut, written as a single word, translates to lucky charms. References to beliefs in good luck fade into daily objects that take on symbolic meaning. The ensemble creates a new imaginary that analyses emotional attachment as both a measure of value and a factor in sustainability.

The designer has chosen to present an unclear time of birth by interrupting the 60s, when industrial aesthetics collided with traditional craft techniques and emotion-based ownership. Haasnoot’s works appear as illogical combinations of familiar forms.

– Somewhere along the process, at the right material displacement, these objects stopped existing as themselves and started to comment on the contexts from which they were reprocessed and rearranged.

In her BA thesis project, she repurposes weaving, knitting and upholstery techniques into contemporary pieces. An oversized tube dress, hand-woven from post-consumer plastic cut into weft, reminiscent of a birch tree, captures her aesthetic strategy. 

Ultimately, Haasnoot’s collection is a product of conceptual design. Imbued with human characteristics, it evokes the sense of a missing presence whose most meaningful belongings are left for us to observe.

– Onnenkalut is an exploration of associativity and instinct. Its randomness is put together with attention.