Henrika Ylirisku

Henrika Ylirisku (Doctor of Arts) is an artist-researcher and an art educator exploring multispecies entanglements, posthuman pedagogies, and ecological thinking through visual and arts-based practices. Combining embodied drawing, place-responsiveness, and speculative experimentation, her work challenges anthropocentric habits of perception and opens up learning-with the more-than-human.

Ylirisku’s research is located at the intersection of environmental art education, artistic research, and feminist posthumanities. In her doctoral dissertation Reorienting Environmental Art Education (2021), she developed a walking-based method to reimagine human-nature relations in local forest environments. She currently works as University Lecturer in Art Education at Aalto University and is part of the Children of the Anthropocene research group, which examines how children and youth engage with multispecies worlds.

Her current research and artistic work investigate how aesthetic and pedagogical gestures may attune us to situated, entangled responsibilities in times of ecological crises.

 

Image: Becoming-with insects, 2019. Photo: Pasi Ylirisku.