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 is currently a resident studio artist at The Creator Incubator, and has paintings with Stella Downer Gallery Sydney, and Leighton Contemporary Gallery, QLD.
Liss has a background in Scientific Illustration, holding a Bachelor Degree with Distinction in Natural History Illustration from the University of Newcastle, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School, majoring in painting. Finney has exhibited across NSW, most recently her work ‘Adventures to far off places’ was awarded Highly commended in the Lake Art Prize, and ‘Self Portrait as a Wetsuit’ won the 2021 Hawkesbury Art Prize Packers Prize. She has been a finalist in the 2022 Newcastle Club Art Prize, The 2022 Brenda Clouten Art Scholarship, 2021 and 2023 National Emerging Art Prize, 2021 Gosford Art Prize, 2021 Little Things Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize.
Currently Liss is undertaking her Masters (sculpture) at the National Art School in Sydney and has worked for Maitland Regional Art Gallery, as the Learning and Audience Development Curator, Art Educator, and facilitating the Arts Health, Art and Dementia programme. She also works at the John Hunter Children’s Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital as an Arts and Health Facilitator, with the Starlight Children’s Foundation. She delivers creative workshops and social interactions to adolescent patients within the general and mental health wards.
