Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland, specialising in working with the voice. Her multi-disciplinary projects blend textural tapestries of vocal composition with costumed choreography in live performance, moving image and audio-visual installation. In her practice, she investigates the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words, to tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture.
Environmental concerns have been the focus of much of her work to date. With a place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments and ecologies. She often draws on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular, practices of vocal and gestural ‘mimesis’ (imitation) of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin. Her recent work engages with 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.
Recent projects include: Into the Mountain (2019) a vocal composition for a women’s choir accompanying Simone Kenyon’s choreography, inspired by the writing of Nan Shepherd; 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 moving image, sound, visual scores, and durational performance; and Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla (2021), an audiovisual installation and site-specific performance exploring Finnish folklore, climate anxiety and ecological grief.
Hanna’s work has been commissioned and presented by organisations in the UK, Europe, USA, India and Australia, and can currently be experienced at the British Art Show 9 (2021-22) touring exhibition, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2021-23) New Arrivals exhibition and the Biennale of Sydney (2022).