KunstenaarFinnish
Heljä Liukko-Sundström
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Heljä Tuulia Mirjam Liukko-Sundström was born on 15 June 1938 in Mynämäki, a small municipality in southwest Finland near Turku. She grew up in a household shaped by education and science - her mother was a teacher, her father an agricultural scientist - and she shared a creative sensibility with a twin brother and two younger sisters who would also go on to work as artists. From early on she was drawn to form and craft, and after completing her studies at the Ateneum art school in Helsinki, graduating as a ceramic artist in 1962, she was accepted the same year into the Arabia Art Department in Helsinki.
Arabia in the early 1960s was one of the most stimulating environments in Finnish applied arts. Liukko-Sundström worked alongside figures including Birger Kaipiainen, Rut Bryk, Toini Muona, and Annikki Hovisaari. The department gave artists considerable latitude to develop their own visual language, and she built hers around a particular kind of warmth: animals - above all rabbits and bears - flowers, children at play, domestic scenes rendered with fine-grained attention. Her ceramic wall plates of the 1970s are among her most admired works: small narratives of everyday life in richly decorated low-relief, produced in limited numbered series. The demand for her pieces eventually led Arabia to establish a dedicated production department for her designs.
Beyond ceramics she developed a body of work in glass, collaborating with Iittala to produce affordable stained-glass-style decorations with nature and spiritual themes, extending her reach to audiences who might not collect ceramic art. She was also a published children's writer, and the interplay between illustration and three-dimensional form informed her practice throughout. In 2005, having worked at Arabia for over four decades, she opened Ateljé Heljä in Humppila, Häme, continuing to work with characteristic intensity - reportedly rising at 3:30 in the morning to spend long hours in the studio - until close to her death on 21 May 2024.
Recognition accumulated steadily across her career. She received the Illum Award in 1977, the IBBY Certificate of Merit in 1984, the title of Professor in 1994, and the Pro Finlandia Medal in 2001. Her work entered the collections of the Helsinki Design Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. A retrospective exhibition at the Hämeenlinna Art Museum in 2023 titled "The Ceramic Artist of Our Homes" drew attention to the sustained affection her work commands among Finnish households.
At auction, Liukko-Sundström's ceramics appear regularly in Scandinavian and Finnish salerooms, with particular activity at Hagelstam and Co in Helsinki and Swedish houses including Roslagens Auktionsverk and Stadsauktion Sundsvall. The Auctionist database currently holds 29 items attributed to her, across ceramics, glass, and metalwork. Top recorded prices include a schoolgirl figurine at 1,600 SEK and a ceramic wall sconce at 929 EUR, reflecting the steady collector interest her Arabia pieces continue to attract.