2019 Emerging Voices shortlist artist Marisa Finos is a sculptor and multimedia artist based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Her sculptures and performances seek to explore thresholds of consciousness, body, and space, and draw inspiration from her reflections on the experience of death and dying in contemporary culture. Her work serves as a platform to engage in conversations that challenge current attitudes about mortality and the ways in which we inhabit our bodies and space. Finos’s research into various concepts of the afterlife, ancient and contemporary funerary practices, burial structures, mourning rituals, and bodily preservation and decay informs the objects she creates. She is also greatly influenced by women’s traditional historical roles ushering people into both life and death, as caretakers of the dying and handlers of the dead, and as creators of mourning rituals and objects.

Finos earned her MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, and her BFA in Ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2007. Her work has been exhibited regionally at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has completed residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Arteles Creative Center in Finland.

Listen to Marisa's object story: