WEERA ALEXANDRA
Artist bio
She is a lover, a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter, and she loves being a woman.
She is a multidisciplinary artist and critical creative practitioner based in Helsinki, currently studying at Taidekoulu Maa. She works primarily with photography, painting, and experimental sculpture.
Her practice explores intuitive connections, inexplicable experiences, and intricate paths of thought, transforming them into images and objects that hold space for ambiguity, vulnerability, and possibility.
She is fascinated by different ways of seeing and experiencing life, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. She is inspired by wise women and seeks a sense of relatability in her work. She is curious by nature and values love, friendship, and listening to people’s stories.
Artist statement
My artwork is a message, a tribute to my ancestor, Saima Tigerstedt-Ylinen. She was born in 1878 and was an artist herself. This is my way of letting her know that I am here, that I think of her, and that she reminds me of myself.
I mainly work with photography and experimental sculpture. I seek peace and grounding elements in my life. I constantly take photos of things in my environment that evoke some kind of feeling or attraction in me while walking. In particular, my attention is drawn to objects lying on the ground and appearing disconnected from their surroundings: dropped items, trash, broken or abandoned things. I admire how they settle into the ground. They are alone and separate, yet at the same time part of their environment, lying peacefully on the ground, at the mercy of the wind, gravity, and the surrounding world.
Feminism, along with a deep love and respect for nature, is fundamental to who I am and shapes the way I see, understand, and engage with the world. I collect literature, particularly books about the lives, experiences, and histories of women and sexual minorities. I’m especially drawn to stories that bring to light voices, lives, and experiences that have been overlooked, forgotten, or left unseen. Through personal narratives, I feel a connection to people I could never have met in person. Moments of identification nurture, they offer understanding even when the world of these stories is distant from my own—whether in time, place, or otherwise. Perhaps that is precisely why history, remembrance, and different ways of being recur in my work.
My practice is process-oriented; it makes me feel alive and helps me accept incompleteness. During my artistic process, I might understand things that are still beyond words, just by looking at the photos I've taken and asking myself why exactly this particular thing caught my attention. Once, while walking down Helsinginkatu, I realized I had identified with an empty cigarette pack, and I can't explain it any further than that.
The materials I work with vary. Different images call for different forms, and finding various objects by chance is an essential part of my work. Sometimes a found object seems to grab my attention more strongly than others, and its ultimate role in my art becomes clear when the time is right. Sometimes it takes years; sometimes the connection to a particular photograph is found immediately.
My art does not aim to provide answers. It brings together fragmented, erratic, and hard-to-express thoughts, thought paths, dead ends, and gives them a visual form. Completing a work feels like a conversation in which I have been heard and validated, a place where I can say things safely without fear or shame, a world full of curious lovers talking to each other with respect.