Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. Her multi-disciplinary projects investigate the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words, to tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture. With a largely place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments, ecologies and places.
In her work, she often draws on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular, practices of vocal and gestural mimesis of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin, both with one other, and across multi-species entanglements. Her most recent work engages with vital questions about what it means to live on a damaged planet, proposing contemporary, queer ritual, as a means to process the trauma that comes with ecological awareness.
Tuulikki’s innovative practice spans live performance, moving image and multi-channel audio-visual installation, blending together textural tapestries of extended vocal composition, gestural choreography, iconic costume and original visual score drawings. Her critically acclaimed work has been commissioned and presented by organisations across visual, musical and performing arts in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, India, and the Middle East, including Bowes Museum (2024), City Art Centre, Edinburgh (2023-24), Mortorenhalle, Dresden (2023), Glasgow Cathedral with Historic Environment Scotland and Arts&Heritage (2023), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2023), National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One (2021-23), In Between Festival, B018, Beirut, Lebanon (2022), Timespan (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021-22), Acoustic Commons, Aix-Marseille (2022), Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2022), Full of Noises, Cumbria (2022), Biennale of Sydney (2022), Kelder, London (2021), Helsinki Biennial (2021), Take Me Somewhere festival, Tramway, Glasgow (2021), the VOV with National Galleries of Scotland (2021), Edinburgh Art Festival (2020), Edinburgh Printmakers (2019), Scottish Sculpture Workshop (2019), Galleri Format, Malmö (2018), Woodstreet Galleries, Pittsburgh (2018), Alchemy Film & Arts (2018), Marseille EXPO (2018), CCA Glasgow (2017), RMIT Melbourne (2017), BALTIC, Gateshead (2017), Dovecot, Edinburgh (2017), BBC Radio 4 (2017), Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), Cappella Nova (2016), Edinburgh Art Festival (2015), ATLAS Arts (2015), The SPACE (2015), Glasgow 2014’s Cultural Programme (2014), Travelling Gallery for GENERATION (2014, Tectonics Festival (2013), Tramway, Glasgow (2013), Red Note Ensemble (2012), Glasgow International (2012).
She was Magnetic North Theatre’s first Artist Attachment supported by Jerwood Arts (2017-19) and shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2020). She was a finalist in the Arts Foundation Music for Change Award (2022), won a Scottish Award for New Music in Sonic Arts (2017), and was twice shortlisted for a British Composer Award (2015, 2017).
Recent projects include the bird that never flew (2023), a place responsive song cycle for Glasgow Cathedral, exploring the city’s ornithological roots, bringing together sacred lament and political protest to raise the alarm for critically endangered birds; Echo in the Dark (2022), a multi-artform project weaving together music and live participatory performance to explore interconnections of raving and bat echolocation as a model for ecological coexistence; Seals’kin (2022), a short film, visual score and participatory vocal performance drawing on myths of human-seal hybridity and folkloric musical practices to offer alternative forms of mourning through sensuous identification with more-than-human kin; Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla (2021), an audiovisual installation and site-specific performance exploring Finnish folklore and the emotional trauma that comes with ecological awareness; Deer Dancer (2019/2021), a body of work examining how deer imitation in dance constructs ‘wilderness’ as the site for the cultivation of hetero-masculinity, impacting on ecologies, featuring a two-channel film, visual scores, and durational performance; Into the Mountain (2019) a vocal composition for a women’s choir inspired by the writing of Nan Shepherd; tidesongs (2017), a composition for multi-layered voice and vocal processing, exploring tidal languages from mouth to sea and back again; cloud-cuckoo-island (2016), a film featuring a solo vocal improvisation in a natural amphitheatre on the Isle of Eigg, exploring madness, exploring trauma, gender and ecology (shortlisted for British Composer Award 2017); SOURCEMOUTH : LIQUIDBODY (2016), an audiovisual installation inspired by India’s mnemonic landscapes and the relationship between river-systems, the body, and Kutiyattam theatre (winner of New Music Scotland Award 2017); Sea Psalm (2016), a choral composition responding to a twelfth-century, Orcadian hymn fragment; Women of the Hill (2015), a site-specific performance featuring a song-cycle for three female performers, responding to archaeology and topography of an Iron-age, matrifocal, sacred site on Skye; SING SIGN: a close duet (2015), a site-specific performance and film installation for the Royal Mile, featuring a score for male and female duo, representing the body-in-communication in relation to gender and the city through wordless song and gesture (shortlisted for British Composer Award 2016); Air falbh leis na h-eòin | Away with the Birds (2010-2015), a body of multi-disciplinary work investigating the mimesis of birds in traditional Scottish Gaelic song, featuring a vocal composition composed from fragments of songs woven into an extended soundscape; spinning-in-stereo (2014), a composition for two voices based on a traditional Gaelic spinning song, presented as visual score and vinyl LP; heart-to-heart (2014), bronze bells cast from a heart-shaped stone; A Rose in the Dawn | A Wake to the Dream (2014) lithographs of two pictorial alphabets; sea saw the circle (2012), a composition for string quartet and musical saw, with visual score; High-slack-low-slack-high (2012), a site-specific composition and performance for four voices and megaphones, using tidal data for the River Clyde.
She studied at Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Art department and graduated in 2006. Her studio is based at Loof Studios on the Southside of Glasgow.
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“Hanna doesn’t just create dialogue with the natural world, she performs it from within”
– Sara Mohr-Pietsch, BBC Radio 3 (Night Tracks, February, 2021)
“Tuulikki is an attentive listener to and enthusiastic learner from the entanglements in which diverse cultures bind themselves to the human and to the more-than-human, just as she hears keenly the ways in which those knots are to be found located in places within the morphologies of landscape and of language. If these connections sound densely drawn, the very opposite is the case: Tuulikki finds the beauties as well as the difficulties in the sonorous.”
– Angus Carlyle, Sound Arts Now (Uniform Books, 2021)
“Hanna is an exceptional artist – her work is utterly original, searching and humane. She works fluidly across art forms, always seeking to expand the communicative possibilities and points of access to her projects. She brings her fierce and associative imagination to marginal cultural forms, vulnerable places, languages, and communities of practice, unearthing and reimagining stories of relevance and resonance in our troubled times.”
– Ruth Little