Meet the On-line Artist // Eliisa Loukola

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Specifically, we’d love to know about your background.

My name is Eliisa Loukola, I am a finnish visual artist and writer based in Helsinki, Finland.

I have studied fine arts in the Netherlands, and I hold a masters degree from MAFA, HKU, Utrecht as well as a bachelor’s degree from Academie Minerva, Groningen.

Since graduating from MAFA I have relocated to Helsinki, where I have taken part in multiple group shows as well as held solo exhibitions.

How would you describe your artistic practice?

My practice is an investigation of temporality, traces, (dis)appearances and embodied memories, beginning with encounters of found objects. I rely on writing as methodology and discuss memory as an embodied, fragile, and transformative phenomenon through dealing with objects as archives of memory in themselves. The poetics of disappearance inform the choices of medium and presentation in my work, which often plays with the translation and inaccessibility of languages.

What is your methodology or process for creating a new project? 

A new project usually begins with an encounter with an object, in the case of the GlogauAIR’s residency, a small painting. I begin my process by writing a description of the object, looking into its details to try and find traces of its past and present. From this initial writing process, I attempt to find a point of dialogue with the given object, going back and forth through different viewpoints, mediums and tools.

Over the years, writing has evolved from a reflective tool into a central medium, equal to my painting, exploring traces, embodied memories, and the unstable relationship between remembering and forgetting. Painting portraits of these objects I work with has become a recurring action in my process, as I find it allows for exploration and a different looking of the object and its memory.

My projects often end up as constellations of text, painting, performance and objects, rather than singular pieces.

What’s the project you’re working on during GlogauAIR’s residency? 

In the project developed during GlogauAIR’s residency, a small childhood painting becomes the axis where three speaking positions, looking, remembering, and being, overlap and intertwine. The work asks what happens in the overlay of text, image, and object: what kind of authorship emerges when the maker changes, when the “I” fractures across time, and when an artwork outlives the hand that made it?

Across the residency, the project has settled into these three viewpoints, whose frictions and overlaps compose the core of the work. The tensions between materiality and memory, between process and retrospect, between identity and its shifting edges form a continuum rather than a hierarchy.

Central to this constellation is ‘portrait of the portrait of Löttö’, an image of the painting’s back: a portrait not of a face but of structure, labour, and uncertainty. It exposes the interior architecture normally hidden from view, the folds, the staples, the frayed weave, like showing the inside of a mouth, the place where voice forms. It is a self-portrait twice removed: the object becomes the subject, the evidence of invisible labour becomes the visible surface, and the childhood and adult makers converge through the material that survives them both.

What emerges is a collaboration across time, a self-portrait distributed between bodies and materials, where the painting’s endurance becomes the thread stitching together the shifting identities of the one who made it.