Helene Nymann is a Danish visual artist and artistic researcher whose practice explores memory, imagination, and participation as collective and relational processes. Working across sculpture, installation, film, digital media, and participatory methods, she creates artworks that bring together artistic imagination, scientific research, and lived experience.

Rather than treating memory as something stored within the individual mind, Nymann approaches it as something that unfolds between people, places, materials, and time. Her works invite visitors to become active participants, asking: How do we remember? What do we forget? Who shapes the stories we inherit? And how might we cultivate more sustainable ways of remembering—and carry those memories into the future?

The Dementia-Friendly Garden at Rigshospitalet is the latest chapter in this ongoing body of research. Developed in collaboration with the Danish Dementia Research Centre as part of the initiative Everyday Life with Dementia, the project brings together researchers, clinicians, healthcare professionals, patients, relatives, and visitors to explore how contemporary art can support new forms of care, participation, and collective remembering. While the spatial design of the garden has been developed by landscape architects, Nymann's artworks have emerged through interdisciplinary collaboration with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, healthcare professionals, and people living with dementia and neurodiversity. Anatomical structures of the brain, studied through fMRI imaging, are brought into correspondence with elements of the landscape, while workshops, conversations, and shared experiences continually shape the artworks themselves.

The workshops are central to the artistic research. Drawing on ancient and Indigenous memory systems, they create situations in which memories, relationships, and new forms of participation can emerge, allowing research and artworks to evolve together. The resulting sculptures, sound works, and interactive installations invite visitors to touch, turn, listen, remember, imagine, and contribute their own experiences, fostering a sense of agency through engagement with art in public space. Rather than offering fixed narratives about dementia, the project opens space for dialogue, recognising that remembering is not simply an individual act but a shared cultural practice. A map that can only be read collectively.

The workshops are central to the artistic research. Drawing on ancient and Indigenous memory systems, they create situations in which memories, relationships, and new forms of participation can emerge, allowing research and artworks to evolve together. The resulting sculptures, sound works, and interactive installations invite visitors to touch, turn, listen, remember, imagine, and contribute their own experiences, fostering a sense of agency through engagement with art in public space. Rather than offering fixed narratives about dementia, the project opens space for dialogue, recognising that remembering is not simply an individual act but a shared cultural practice. A map that can only be read collectively.