Artist Neea Kuurne takes disturbingly raw close-up images of her lips

“I want people to look at my work and feel something. Feel amazed, feel disgusted, feel wowed, feel pain. Just feel something,” says lip artist Neea Kuurne. Originally from Finland and now living in New York, Neea’s art began as a hobby. “I've always loved being creative and have painted since I was a little kid.”  Combining her love of painting with her interest in beauty, Neea decided to pursue a career in make-up, honing her craft at Finland’s prestigious Make Up For Ever Academy, where she graduated best in her class in 2013 and won a scholarship to the main school in Paris a year after.

Since then, Neea has worked with the cosmetic giant MAC and as a freelance artist, assembling an impressive portfolio of work including music videos, album covers, fashion editorials, film and TV.

But it is the work she carries out on her self which is of most note. “Back when I first started doing make-up looks on myself I did a lot of the whole face looks,” she explains. “Then little by little I focused on the eyes or the lips, and then after a while, I figured I could do some really creative and weird stuff on my lips and still convey a profound message with my work.”

Fast-forward to today, and Neea focuses solely on lips, creating bewilderingly beautiful looks using everyday objects such as flora and fauna, from the grounds of her cottage in Finland, as well as cigarettes, sweets, and nail clips, which she then takes visually arresting and sometimes disturbingly surreal close-up pictures of.

After the success of her first solo exhibition in Helsinki, 2017’s Pretty/Ugly, Neea’s next show will focus on the untouched nature of her images. “RAW comes from the raw photos,” she explains. “I don’t use Photoshop, or filters, or anything in my work. Everything is super raw, and you can see everything from my pores to my blackheads to my nose hairs and that's okay because we all have them. I'm just so over the whole overly retouched beauty pictures I see everywhere now, so that’s my statement to go totally RAW.”

Neea’s ethos of wanting to keep her images natural is coupled with a desire to have fun with her work, and not take beauty so seriously – something which is evident in her playful oscillation from her more classic beauty images, for a example a matte red lip, to her more bizarre creations. In one she distorts her lip shape entirely through the use of bondage. In another, she feigns stabbing with nails. And in a third she covers her lips in a mucus-like membrane, asking us to question whether what we are looking is actually lips at all.

“I think make-up is a tool to be creative and just have fun with it,” Neea explains. “The underlying message of my work is that you don’t need to look a certain way, the way that society tries to force everyone to look, to fit in. Instead be proud and happy just the way you are, and with make-up, you can play and change your look without taking it too seriously.”

RAW will be showing at Art On A Gallery, East Village, NYC from 15th of November – 13th of December, 2018