Alma Heikkilä

Alma Heikkilä (born 1984) lives and works in Helsinki. She is a founding member of Mustarinda, a multidisciplinary collective located in the old-growth forests of northern Finland, that hosts residencies at the intersection between art and ecology. Heikkilä graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Kiasma, Helsinki (2019), Casco Art Institute, Utrecht (2018), Gallery Ama, Helsinki (2017, 2013), and elsewhere. She has participated in biennials in Fiskars, Finland; Timisoara, Romania; Gwanju, South Korea. She was awarded the Ducat Prize by the Finnish Art Society in 2014. 

Her work is included in the collections of Kiasma and the Finnish National Gallery. Alma Heikkilä is fascinated by the collective activities of soil creatures; from nematodes to fungi, spores to mycelium. Heikkilä’s artistic work evokes a deep sensorial knowledge of ecosystems and the interdependencies of myriad organisms in mutual co-existence. Finding form in sculpture and large-scale painting, she strives to create a space for humans to imagine an up-close encounter or experience with the invisible processes that occur in the soil, often at a microscopic level.