I am Eleny Kasemets, an Estonian visual artist based in Tallinn. Before returning to Estonia, I lived and worked as an artist in Berlin for eight years. This period became an important part of the development of my artistic practice and continues to influence the way I approach both ideas and materials.
My practice moves between painting, objects, installation and material experimentation. I am interested in fragility, memory, transformation and the ways materials carry traces of time and experience. Rather than working within one defined medium, I choose materials according to the idea and allow the process itself to influence the final form of the work.
Intuition and the presence of the material play an important role in my practice; meanings often emerge through chance, interruption and reinterpretation. I am interested in what happens when something familiar changes context, becomes fragmented, is preserved, altered or given a new function.
My work often explores the tension between preservation and change, beauty and vulnerability, permanence and disappearance. I am also interested in how personal and collective memories shape the way we perceive objects, images and our surroundings.
Alongside these more intimate themes, my work reflects on broader social, cultural and environmental questions. I see visual art as a way to make certain issues visible, to create space for reflection and to open dialogue rather than provide fixed answers. The relationship between the individual and society, and the ways social realities become embedded in memory, material and everyday objects, form an important part of this interest.
Sustainability is an integral part of my working process. I aim to make conscious choices about materials, reuse existing works and leftover materials whenever possible, and allow discarded or transformed elements to become the starting point for new work.
I graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts and am a member of the Estonian Artists’ Association, the Estonian Watercolour Association and the Professional Association of Visual Artists Berlin (bbk berlin). From 2024 to 2026, I served on the board of the Estonian Watercolour Association. My work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Estonia and internationally.
Outside my main artistic practice, I occasionally work on VillVill, a personal side project focused on hand-knitted and hand-dyed woollen garments.
For exhibition enquiries, collaborations or other questions, you can contact me at eleny@kasemets.net.
