Katja Tukiainen 

Every Time We Grow (2026)

My collaboration with my Islandic colleague Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir started ten years ago in 2016. We were invited to participate in Art Inside Out´s residency in Laholm and exhibit at Teckningsmuseet together. We met for the first time and lived together in a beautiful old house full of stories. Sigga took long walks and I cycled to the seashore to swim, during the moments when we were not working. And we indeed were working, we worked a lot, loved to draw and paint every day and evening. We found our visual styles and colors to be interestingly different and collaboration to be easy and natural.

The juxtaposition of Sigga’s dark hues and my shades of pink are creating a dialogue about nature and (wo)manhood. Our mood for working is equally devoted, and we learned how well we flow together in spaces like museum walls.

When we reunited, in preparation for this exhibition, our intuitive and collaborative ideas started growing immediately. We were talking about butterfly effects and moths; we visited a few exhibitions together and kept in contact to let our ideas grow. I started to paint butterflies again, after many years, and wondered what they wanted to tell me. I followed them until I found the moth that sucks tear liquids, more poetically said: drinks tear drops. Calyptra thalictri (Latin) moths are also called vampire moths, because specially the males can drink blood of larger animals. But as I turn almost everything in my art to be a little feminine, I paint my moths as female and let them drink tear drops. In my mother language Finnish, the same moth is called Kyynelyökkönen, a tear drop moth. The girls and women in my art grow wings for themselves.

– Katja Tukiainen

Katja Tukiainen is a Finnish artist who creates site-specific narratives across diverse art forms, including comics, paintings, and animations. Her visual language is characterized by a feminist “girl’s room” aesthetic—featuring an expressive, personal style and a warm color palette—with many works being autobiographical and exploring themes of inner transformation and motherhood. The figure of the girl recurs throughout Tukiainen’s body of work, appearing in everything from graphic novels to tattoos.

http://www.katjat.net/

For the residency Katja Tukiainen vs Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir (Laholm Municipality, 2016), two Nordic artists were brought together to jointly explore the nature and future of drawing. The encounter between their practices illustrated the evolution and artistic breadth of the medium by combining drawing with painting, sculpture, animation, and video.