Liisa-Irmelen Liwata ^{Emerging artist}

Artist's country of origin: Finland

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata is a Finnish-Congolese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. In her works Liwata discusses the connections between body, land and language in the shaping of one’s cultural identity. As a person who has grown up at the intersection of several cultures, she is interested to explore that point where one’s being is interlaced. She works with ceramics in a painterly way, so that the images are created on the clay surface by pressing and sliding different colored clays. In it, the layered rolling of shapes is a combination of printmaking, collage work and finger painting. What fascinates her about the technique is that it places ceramic art in a wider context, expressing the versatility and potential of ceramics as a material in the middle ground between painting and sculpture. Liwata is currently studying at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in the department of time and space. She has graduated with a BA from Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture in 2019, including studies at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She has had several group exhibitions including Solar Fiction in Galleria Aarni (FI) 2021 and Generation 2020 in Amos Rex art museum (FI) 2020. Her videowork “Writing Tool” in the Generation 2020 exhibition was also selected as one of the critics favourites by the Finnish press (Helsingin Sanomat).