Collection: Liss Finney
@lissfinney
www.lissfinney.com
Liss Finney, born in 1992 in Lutruwita (Tasmania), is an Australian artist living and working between Awabakal Country in Newcastle and Gadigal Land, Sydney, NSW. Her practice spans painting, installation, and sculpture, delving into her multi-generational family heritage in funeral directing and the deeply human awareness of one's own mortality. Finney reimagines artefacts, incorporates found objects, and explores the luxuries of ritual to initiate an examination of Western society's aversion to conversations about death and dying.
Through her use of materials, colour palette, and shapes, she reconsiders cultural narratives surrounding mortality. Many of her works are a reflection of her own body size, serving as a meditative exploration of her own impermanence. Using colours of transition and transcendence to create illusions of 'third spaces,' thresholds into realms that remain inaccessible in the realm of the living. In her work, Finney endeavours to challenge and extend the societal and social reference points through which we can perceive and understand death culture.
She has been a finalist in the Blake Prize, National Emerging Artist Prize, Brenda Clouten Memorial Art Scholarship, the Lake, Hawkesbury, and Gosford Art Prizes.