Elke Finkenauer
visual artist

Bio

Elke Finkenauer (Aotearoa New Zealand/German) is a visual artist based between Glasgow and Auckland. Exhibitions include: 'Hold' at New Glasgow 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) and Gus Fisher Gallery (2018). Her 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 she was awarded the Glasgow Visual Artist and Craft Maker Bursary. Finkenauer has an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art (2015) and a PgDipFA from Elam School of Fine Art (2013). Before practicing as an artist she studied a business degree and worked as a data analyst in Auckland and London.​​

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About my work

Elke Finkenauer works primarily with sculpture, drawing, text, and improvised systems, using 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 her practice thinking happens through making; knowledge is formed (and questioned) in collaboration with materials and methods. Through slow, structured processes that embrace error and uncertainty she challenges notions of optimisation and success, proposing instead  reflective, embodied ways of learning.​​

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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. 

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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”.

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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 experiences of relocation; studies at a small, rural art and craft school; my former career as a data analyst; and family members who are plumbers, technicians, sewers, bakers, and accumulators of ordinary things.​

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