Liina Viira is a multidisciplinary artist working with clothing and objects. Her practice explores the tension between inherited craft and contemporary form, tradition and refusal, memory and reinvention.
I was born and raised in Sweden, with Estonian heritage that always lived just beneath the surface.
My grandparents fled the country. I grew up elsewhere.
After twenty-five years in Sweden, I came back to a place I hadn’t lived in, but had carried all along.
A return shaped not by experience, but by inheritance.
What began as distance became curiosity. Curiosity became research. Research became practice. I think with my hands. Handcraft is my language and my way of relating to the world. Making is not separate from thinking. It is where thinking happens.
My interest in traditional clothing and techniques comes from wanting to understand where I come from, not to preserve it as it was, but to put it into motion.
Today I live and work in Estonia. My partner is Estonian. Our children are born and raised here, bilingual by default.
This place is no longer inherited. It is chosen.
I create clothing and objects by pulling two opposing forces together, the weight of tradition and the refusal to repeat it.
I work with inherited techniques, knit structures, woven logic, hand-finished details, but not with inherited meanings. I use them as raw material, rebuilding and rewiring them into new forms.
What was once ceremonial, slow or “ethno” becomes something sharper, stripped down and put into everyday motion.
My practice exists in contradiction, craft that behaves like streetwear, heritage without nostalgia, precision cut with instinct, identity treated as a moving target rather than a fixed idea.
This is not a brand and not an attempt to be one. It’s a continuous investigation, an ongoing study of how forms, memories and materials shape us, and how far they can be stretched.
Each piece is a question: What happens when tradition refuses to stay in its box?
I design from that tension. I follow what feels true, not what feels expected.
