Hanna Tuulikki is an award-winning British-Finnish artist, composer, and performer based in Scotland. Her work explores our connection with the more-than-human world. Practising across sound art, music, visual art, and live art, she blends sonic composition with ritual forms and visual elements – including costume, choreography, and graphic scores – to tell ‘stories of re-worlding’ through immersive installation, moving image, and live performance.
At the heart of her practice, Tuulikki works with the voice, using singing and extended vocalisation to explore how the body communicates beyond language. Her sonic compositions weave vocal textures – both composed and improvised – with field recordings and electronics. Often site-specific, her work engages directly with place, activating natural acoustics and adopting processes of experimental translation to create hybrid ‘human-and-more-than-human’ soundscapes. Her work with choreography, costume, and visual scores expands this inquiry, examining how movement and image can embody a kinaesthetic form of listening, while her drawn notations map relationships between voices, bodies, and landscapes, deepening our sensory connection to place and ecology.
Ecological research underpins Tuulikki’s practice, particularly around multispecies kinship. She draws on embodied vernacular knowledge, especially sonic and bio-mimesis – imitating the sounds and movements of other creatures – to ask what we might learn from animals and birds about how to coexist on our shared planet in times of ecological crisis. Her recent research explores the emotional dimensions of climate crisis and biodiversity loss, and how art and music can help us navigate grief, wonder, and care in a rapidly changing world.
For her work across multiple disciplines, she has received a Paul Hamlyn Artist Award (2025), a Henry Moore Artist Award (2025), an Oram Award (2024), and a Scottish Award for New Music in Sonic Arts (2017). She was shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award in Sound Art (2024), was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Music for Change Award (2022), shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2020), and twice shortlisted for a British Composer Award (2015, 2017). She held an Artist Attachment with Magnetic North Theatre, supported by Jerwood Arts (2017–19).
Tuulikki’s 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 Jameel Arts Centre (2025-26), Folkestone Triennial (2025), Prototipoak: Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2025), Lost Farm Festival, Denmark (2025), Timespan (2024-25), Radical Ecology / Southcombe Barn, Dartmoor (2024), 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).
Recent projects include Love (Warbler Remix) (2025), an expanded radio work blending love songs and bird song inspired by the mimicry of the Marsh Warbler, to explore migration and cross‑species kinship; 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