Maria Finn’s work revolves around memory, time and landscape. Significant for her practice is an inter-medial approach that involves several different media such as photography, drawing and video, as well as wall drawings. Language also plays a vital role, where she deconstructs existing fiction or creates new based on her own texts. These fragmented stories are presented in scenarios that convey mental states and subconscious processes. Recurring motifs are landscapes and patterns with which Finn investigates how we represent nature.
Ole Haslund’s Artist Grant 2015:
The artist Maria Finn graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997 and completed at the same place in 2010 the Ph.D. thesis “Images Between the Word and the Film”, an analysis of how the still image both determines narratives, as well as locations, in film. Maria Finn has participated in and curated numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, here will be mentioned the exhibition “Technically Sweet” from 2008, which she arranged with Yvette Brackman, and which was shown both at Participant Inc., New York, and at Overgaden, Copenhagen. Last time one has been able to see Maria Finn in Copenhagen was in the spring of 2015 at the Free Exhibition, where she participated with a new video work in combination with text and drawing.
Maria Finn has over the years worked particularly with drawing and photography, and since 2007 also with video. Her pencil drawings reproduce greyscales, located near the b/w photograph, but instead of registering, they abstract. The motives are many: landscapes as mental states, patterns from textiles as psychological mind images. Both interiors and exteriors are produced in a manner that uses the white paper as an important space-creating factor. There is a certain indefinable atmosphere of Maria Finn’s drawings, an atmosphere from the space between fiction and reality.
For her serious and long-standing work, particularly in the medium of drawing, Maria Finn is awarded with Ole Haslund’s Artist Grant 2015.