Premio Combat Prize

Be it brush on canvas or a camera lens to the world, creativity, from an early age has been a significant part of my life. It has led me to destinations such as New York, Berlin, Rome, London and Amsterdam in search of material for my projects. Urban Dreams is such a collection that draws inspiration from the streets of these iconic cities.

Most of my artworks are digital collages. The process to create a final version of my artwork can take quite a long time. It all starts with an idea. After that I start to gather material, this could involve for example going to photograph Scandinavian rock art as I did for Archaic Dreams series.
Materials can be almost anything – hand drawings and paintings, my photos and even sometimes vector graphics. The most important thing is that they are my own unique creation. The final stage of my creative process involves a lot of choices and decisions between slight variations in tonalities and saturation that will result in the final version.
I have used the artist name Mirja Birgitta since 2015 and I write also an artist blog Arshop in my native Finnish language.
I have five hand-signed museum quality prints of each piece available. They are also available as poster quality re-prints, bearing my logo and can be found on the Saatchi Art online store.
Series of Dreams is a project that has spanned over 10 years and is still marching forward with my collection of abstract works growing at steady pace. The series has been exhibited on multiple occasions.

One of my main themes is time. In particular I use a concept that I like to term Vertical Time. A single layered point is the foundation upon which I lay the past, the present and the future. This layered dimension of depth is best expressed by using digital techniques.
Vertical time is a research that evolved from my 2005 series Archaic Dreams. In that series I blended and fused my photographs of ancient Scandinavian rock paintings and carvings, northern shamanistic symbols and images of present day wildlife and nature.
A person may notice that vertical time is a reoccurring theme that runs throughout some of my other layered abstract artworks. These pieces feature my personal collection of old paintings intertwined with modern pieces and photographs. They represent and narrate my long emotional and experimental journey as a human being.