Liss Finney (b. 1992, Lutruwita/Tasmania) is an artist living and working between Awabakal Land, Newcastle and Gadigal Land, Sydney, NSW. Her practice, informed by personal and familial proximity to funeral culture, situates death as a relational field activated through objects and ritual. Through a materially driven sculptural practice, she examines the boundaries and slippages between artefacts, rituals, and the corporeal realities of decay. Her works function as vessels for reflection on mortality, interweaving memory, material experimentation, and existential philosophy to consider how ritual and objecthood mediate our relationship to death.
Liss holds a BFA in painting (2023) and an MFA in Sculpture (2025) from the National Art School, previously completing a Bachelor Degree with Distinction in Natural History Illustration from the University of Newcastle (2016). She was the recipient Clitheroe Foundation Masters Scholarship in 2023 and the Tropical LAB Singapore Residency Prize in 2024. She h as exhibited nationally and internationally, and most recently was awarded Runner Up in the 2025 Brenda Clouten Travelling Scholarship Prize. She has previously been a finalist in the Lake Prize, Hawkesbury Art Prize, Newcastle Club Art Prize, National Emerging Art Prize, and Blake Prize.
Liss is a sessional lecturer at the National Art School and works at the John Hunter Children’s Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital as an Arts and Health Facilitator.
