Aurea Tanttu (b. 1996, Finland) holds an MFA from Konstfack University of Arts and Crafts, Stockholm and a BFA from Wimbledon College of Arts, London. She has exhibited in Helsinki, Stockholm, London, and Barcelona. Her work is included in the Ersta Diakoni Public Collection (Stockholm) and the AMOCA permanent collection (Wales).

I approach painting as a tool to dig out both past and future memories, or as a kind of reckoning between the corporal and the eternal. Living overseas, both as a young girl and in my twenties, has shaped the way I process my visual surroundings. The state of homesickness transforms the mundane into something sentimental and childlike, or ominous, and it’s often these observations that make their way into my work. I enjoy the occasional and involuntary nod to painterly tropes, particularly those of Romanticism. The heavy use of colour in my work is a means of evoking the urgency of a particular moment — much like a rush of nostalgia or the sensation of being thrown into another dimension. I work with oil paint on a variety of supports. The material choices contribute to the emotional register of each piece, from the rough tactility of jute to the smooth absorption of panel.