Elke Finkenauer
visual artist

Bio

Elke Finkenauer (Aotearoa New Zealand/German) is a visual artist based between Glasgow and Auckland. She has an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art (2015) and a PgDipFA from Elam School of Fine Art (2013). Her recent project ‘Fragments of a Method’ / ‘BitParts’ (2020-2024) was developed in parallel with research undertaken with Creative Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In 2022 Elke was awarded the Glasgow Visual Artist and Craft Maker Bursary. Exhibitions include: 'Hold' at New Glagow Society (2025); 'Fragments of a Method' at NorthArt Auckland (2025); ‘Doing Data’ with Creative Informatics/Creative Horizons at Inspace Gallery, Edinburgh (2022); ‘Members Club’ at Gus Fisher Gallery (2019); and ‘Something to Remember’ at The Suter Gallery (2019).
Before becoming a practicing artist, Elke studied a business degree and worked as a data analyst in Auckland and London.​​

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About my work

Working primarily with sculpture, drawing, text, and improvised systems, I use every-day, leftover, and repurposed materials to examine the gap between lived experience and the ordered structures—linguistic, economic, technological—used to describe it. In my practice thinking happens through making. Knowledge is formed (and questioned) in collaboration with materials and processes, rather than imposed upon them.

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Projects such as Fragments of a Method and Process Notes adopt rule-based, durational approaches that deliberately resist efficiency, accuracy, and resolution. By creating an analogue dataset – a blind drawing of each thing in my studio – or making improvised sculptures from randomised material groupings, I foreground mistakes and partial understandings as generative modes of knowledge.

Personal history runs through this material inquiry. In Tend to Improbable Structures, I reimagine the practical, idiosyncratic domestic constructions made by my late father as adaptive intelligence architectures. Functioning as both lament and call to action, these works contrast contemporary systems that privilege prediction and optimisation with an analogue, experiential form of “deep learning”.

Across earlier works addressing ageing, intimacy, consumerism, and online selfhood, I return to moments of awkwardness, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Whether translating emotions through arbitrary algorithms or mimicking totems of the art market, I use humour and misalignment to expose the limits of systems that claim to measure success and value.

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My recent research includes cognitive and behavioural science (in particular how human understanding emerges through heuristics, embodiment, and uncertainty). My perspectives are informed by my former career as a data analyst; experiences of relocation; studies at a small, rural art and craft school; and family members who are plumbers, technicians, sewers, bakers, and accumulators of ordinary things.​

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