Pauliina Cross is a contemporary artist and visual designer based in Helsinki, Finland. Her work began with intimate tablescapes and hedonistic moments, shaped by her background in hospitality and the food and beverage industry. These early pieces explored the human need to gather, to celebrate, and to feel cared for.

Today, Cross’s practice moves between what is seen and what is suggested, still rooted in the themes of intimacy and ritual. Working on paper and raw linen with acrylic, oils and oil stick, she lets gesture, colour and layered marks hold the meaning that once belonged to more literal objects. Through layering, erasing and reworking with both intention and impulse, her subjects shift into something more abstracted. The result is not a depiction of an experience but a trace of one, a kind of emotional architecture.

Her work speaks to the desire for belonging and the ways people mark their lives with moments of care, celebration and connection. At the same time, it questions the fragility of these rituals and the tension between comfort and longing. Cross invites the viewer to sense both the warmth and the uncertainty in her pieces, to recognise the familiar pull toward closeness and celebration, while also confronting the otherness that exists beneath it.

I have always carried a sense of living both inside and just outside the worlds I move through. Hospitality gave me access to belonging, but always from a slight remove. Close enough to feel everything, far enough to keep observing. I became the warm, connective person in the room to counter the quiet feeling of being peripheral. Even as I learned to hold a space and create ease for others, a part of me always watches from above, like a fly on the ceiling.
This tension between closeness and distance sits beneath my obsession with ritual, hedonism and hospitality. My work is an attempt to understand not only what binds us, but what remains unsaid when we gather.