Pauliina Cross

Pauliina Cross is a Helsinki-based abstract visual artist working in Pukinmäki, Helsinki. Her practice is driven by a strong desire to understand the people around her, their motivations, and experiences of belonging and separateness. Cross’s works are held in private collections across Europe and the United States.

Her process-driven works always begin with an emotion or experience. They often explore the longing for connection and the uncertainty that arises when we encounter ourselves or one another with honesty and vulnerability, forever yearning for something. By layering acrylic paint with oils and oil sticks, Cross seeks to portray the inner architecture of emotion through colours, forms, and the ways in which they interact and blend. Her works possess a geological, layered rhythm and texture, created using various mediums as well as sand and cold wax. Cross makes the frames for her works from pale pine moulding.

“My process is a kind of dialogue with the emerging work. Layer by layer, I present my emotions to the canvas, which responds with a counterargument. The process demands radical honesty, just as I believe a true sense of belonging does. The finished work always reveals the journey behind it: its layers, its courage, and a certain uncertainty that is an essential part of all human emotion.”