Tallinn-based artist Helena Pass brings traditional Estonian folk timekeeping into a contemporary graphic context through a series of 17 stone lithographs, each editioned and mounted as a matchbox label.
Some might consider it radical to name the months after the world you actually live in. Bread Month, Hay Month, Horse-Nodding Month… The traditional Estonian lunar calendar, shaped by domestic routine, agricultural labour and the particular temperament of northern seasons, offers a way of marking time that feels far more honest than the abstract numbers we use today.
“I think the old month names are simply more fun,” says Pass. “They reflect weather, work, and habits instead of abstract dates. It’s beautiful that for example in Finnish this way of naming months still exists.”
Pass’s series Month to Month takes these 17 folk month names as its subject and finds for them an unexpected but entirely logical home: the matchbox label. The series consists of 17 stone lithographs, each editioned and mounted as a matchbox label, bringing ancestral nature-based timekeeping into a format that is modest, tactile and historically loaded in its own right. Estonia, like many countries across the last century, produced beautifully designed labels that brought together illustration, typography and print in a small but powerful format. Pass has long been drawn to that tradition. “Alongside my printmaking practice, I also work as an illustrator, and I often draw inspiration from vintage packaging and old labels,” she explains. The matchbox label, for her, is not a nostalgic gesture but a genuine medium: something held in the hand, used, circulated and kept.
The choice of lithography is equally considered. Historically the very process used to print matchbox labels in the 19th and 20th centuries, stone lithography connects the project to its own material past, allowing the technique and the imagery to echo the same history from different directions. By returning to this process, Pass closes a loop between cultural memory and print heritage, letting both carry the weight of what the work is actually about: how symbols travel through time and how print can preserve collective experience in intimate, tangible form.
The folk calendar names that anchor the series carry real poetry. Lent Month, Hay Month, Bread Month reveal how closely time was once tied to the rhythms of survival, to weather and work and the particular texture of each season. Pass was drawn to the directness of this language and the traces it holds of older habits, shared climate and collective life. Placing that cultural memory onto a small everyday object makes the series feel genuinely generous, inviting the work into ordinary hands rather than onto gallery walls alone, though a framed version was shown at the Wiiralt Prize Exhibition in Tallinn in September 2025.
Helena Pass is an artist and illustrator based in Tallinn, Estonia. She studied graphic arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts and photography at Pallas University of Applied Sciences, with exchange studies in Prague and Plymouth. Her practice combines drawing and printmaking, often realised through artist books that balance structure and intimacy, exploring peripheral and transitional environments and the relationship between people and the natural world.
Stone lithographs, 2024 to 2025. Photography: Helena Pass, except printing process photography by Triin Mänd.
