Hanna Tuulikki

This blind embossed print was commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers as part of Hanna Tuulikki's solo exhibition Deer Dancer in 2019. Highland Fling Arm Positions uses the embossed shape of a red deer antler to trace the various positions the arms take throughout the Highland Fling dance sequence.

Deer Dancer was an audiovisual installation incorporating music and costumed choreography on film, presented alongside a series of visual score print works made during Tuulikki's residency in the print studio at Edinburgh Printmakers. The exhibition explored masculinity in 'gender performance' and took inspiration from representation of deer within dance and rituals in difference cultures. 

Biography

Hanna Tuulikki is an artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. She studied at Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Art department and graduated in 2006, and now works from her studio in Glasgow.

Tuulikki has been selected for British Art Show 9 beginning its UK tour next year, widely acknowledged as the most important recurrent exhibition of contemporary art produced in Britain. She was Magnetic North Theatre’s first Artist Attachment supported by Jerwood Arts (2017-19), and was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2019).

She works primarily with the voice and gesture and her 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.

In research-led, multi-disciplinary projects, she investigates the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words. With a particular interest in the practice of ‘mimesis’ within musical and movement traditions across cultures, her work explores the place of folk narratives, memory, ritual and technology within specific environments. Informed by contemporary understandings of ‘naturecultures’ and ‘gender performance’, her work gravitates towards the spaces ‘in-between’, be it human-and-more-than-human, male-and-female, or ancient-and-contemporary, considering the ‘sounding body’ as a meeting point between self and the world.

These ideas were reflected within her recent project Deer Dancer, commissioned here at Edinburgh Printmakers. As part of the project, Tuulikki created Highland Fling Arm Positions an edition of 20 blind embossments. Using the shape of a red deer antler the artist has traced the various positions the arms take throughout the Highland Fling dance sequence. For further reading on Hanna’s research on Deer Dancer visit her blog on the project here: https://www.magneticnorth.org.uk/blog/falling-in-step-with-the-deer-dancer

Her critically acclaimed work has been commissioned and presented by organisations across visual, musical and performing arts in the UK, Europe, USA, India and Australia. Exhibitions include: 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 Deer Dancer (2019), an audiovisual installation examining how deer imitation in dance constructs ‘wilderness’ as the site for the cultivation of hetero-masculinity, impacting on ecologies; 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.