I am an Estonian painter, poet and critic. I work primarily through self-portraiture and symbolic transformations of animals, plants and other figures. Rather than illustrating ideas, I use painting as a way of thinking. My paintings often arrive at questions before I can formulate them in words.
Over the years, I have come to understand my practice as a conversation rather than a demonstration. Each painting develops through attention to material, accident, memory and the history of painting itself. I am interested in how meaning gradually emerges through making, and in the moments when a painting resists the explanations I initially bring to it.
Queer experience informs this practice, though less as a fixed identity than as a way of inhabiting the world. It has made me attentive to uncertainty, recognition and embodiment, and to experiences that exceed the categories available to describe them. These concerns appear in my paintings through bodies, gestures, animals and acts of symbolic translation. Rather than resolving ambiguity, I am interested in remaining with it long enough for another kind of recognition to become possible.
I hold a BA in Painting from the University of Tartu (2016) and an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts Helsinki (2025). Between these degrees I studied Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Edinburgh. Alongside my visual practice I write poetry and art criticism. My poems and criticism have received several awards. I have exhibited my work professionally since 2012 in Estonia, Scotland and Finland.
