Eeva-Maria Mutka

 

 

Eeva-Maria Mutka is a performer and installation maker based in Bristol, UK. Her current embodied visual art work takes the form of semi-permanent sculpture, mark-making and photographic images, co-emerging with performative action. 

 

At the core of her movement-based practice is ‘ making ma ‘, the Japanese concept of opening awareness to the space between impulses, where imagery arises. 

 

Responding to site and the sensory qualities of her materials, she assembles relational situations with objects - found, reclaimed, made-up - and adds herself in this visceral transformation of human and place. The interaction may evoke ritual or physical work, whilst the story remains purposefully ambiguous, revealing unconscious, personal and collective mythologies, forces that move us. 

 

E-M draws on her Finnish heritage, rich in animism: drawings have movement, forms, costumes and the space itself gain life in dynamic installations which re-invigorate a folkloric potential for magic and pursue new meaning in our fluid contemporary world. 

 

E-M studied initially at the London Academy of Movement and Dramatic Art 1989-1992, and since then her career has spanned across Theatre, Dance, Film and Visual Art. She has a rigorous training in image making, presence and the use of space via theatre and dance improvisation-in-performance. She has performed with numerous choreographers & directors internationally over three decades - Gaby Agis, Miranda Pennell, Miranda Tufnell, Tetsuro Fukuhara, Jo Fong, Florence Peake amongst others. Recent co-creation with Scotty Hardwig and Andrea Olsen, a short film Matkalla, won multiple awards worldwide.

As Artist-Maker she has received ACW funding and a Plethu commission in Wales and since 2024 undertaken art residencies in Bristol, Devon and Northampton, US.