Biography
Harina Raina is the spelling under which the Finnish artist Harriina Räinä (born 1989) sometimes appears in cataloguing systems that cannot render the doubled 'i' or the diacritic on 'ä'; the two spellings refer to the same person. She was born in northern Finland and is based on Harakka island, off the coast of Helsinki, where she works in a research-oriented visual practice spanning Japanese-tradition woodblock printmaking, sculpture, moving image, photography, and text. Her academic training is in printmaking: she took a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2019 from the Printmaking department of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, the principal Finnish art academy. During her studies she undertook a graduate exchange at the University of Tsukuba in Japan (2017) in Plastic Art and Mixed Media, which gave her early sustained access to Japanese print pedagogy. Her earlier training included Visual and Media Arts at the Academy of Pekka Halonen (2013) and Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Stockholm University (2010).
Räinä's mokuhanga work is consistently embedded inside larger artistic-research projects rather than presented as discrete pictorial statements. The Other as Matter -- developed in part during her 2021 Saari Residence (Kone Foundation, Mynämäki) -- examined the historical use of animal-derived materials in printmaking, including brushes made from animal hair and bone-derived glues; the project was presented as an academic paper at the International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2021) in Nara, and her work was included in the associated SUMI-FUSION juried international exhibition that year. Subsequent exhibition projects include the solo Planetary Beings (2025), the forthcoming Skeletal Earths, Afterlife Waters (2026), Volatile Shells and Clutch on commercial oyster farming, and Visage and Hunted, drawn from the Finnish moose-hunting tradition that runs in her family. Solo and group venues include the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) (2022), Photographic Gallery Hippolyte (2023), Titanik Gallery in Turku (2023), MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre (2025), and the Aine Art Museum, with an exhibition scheduled at Forum Box, Helsinki, in autumn 2027. Residency placements include the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2024), the Triangle Arts Association in New York (2025), Cove Park and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Scotland, and the Saari Residence; she has received grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Kone Foundation, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Her work is held in the State Collection of Finland and other Finnish institutional collections. She is best understood as a printmaking-trained contemporary artist whose mokuhanga practice is methodological -- a means for posing ethical and material questions about printmaking itself -- rather than stylistic.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1989
- Nationality
- 🇫🇮Finland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Harina Raina is the spelling under which the Finnish artist Harriina Räinä (born 1989) sometimes appears in cataloguing systems that cannot render the doubled 'i' or the diacritic on 'ä'; the two spellings refer to the same person. She was born in northern Finland and is based on Harakka island, off the coast of Helsinki, where she works in a research-oriented visual practice spanning Japanese-tradition woodblock printmaking, sculpture, moving image, photography, and text. Her academic training is in printmaking: she took a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2019 from the Printmaking department of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, the principal Finnish art academy. During her studies she undertook a graduate exchange at the University of Tsukuba in Japan (2017) in Plastic Art and Mixed Media, which gave her early sustained access to Japanese print pedagogy. Her earlier training included Visual and Media Arts at the Academy of Pekka Halonen (2013) and Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Stockholm University (2010).
Harina Raina was active born in 1989. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Harina Raina's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.