Malina Izumi Sintnicolaas is a mixed media artist, writer, and educator currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia – the traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. With a practice focused mostly in ceramic, and fibre sculpture, her works are considered to be manifestations, transmutations, or “petrifications” of emotions into a physical form. Both fibre and ceramics are materials that have an interesting contrast in properties, that they can be so strong yet so fragile at the same time, which correlates to the subject matter of her work, because like the materials, the human psyche is fragile, unpredictable, and difficult to maintain. Drawn to tactile materials and working with embodiment and emotional energy, her work is questioning ways in which one can represent emotions such as depression, trauma, and anxiety with a physical form and in what ways can one induce empathy for an object even if that object is abstract. She pulls from her own experience as a queer person who experiences C-PTSD and experiences an autoimmune disorder, and is looking at what ways can she use material to broaden discussions and representation around mental health. Working with texture, surface, material properties, and form, her sculptures drive to evoke feeling from the viewer to create an empathic landscape that will urge an understanding for states of mind which are difficult to be described verbally.  She received her B.F.A from York University, and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.  She is currently teaching Visual Arts and Ceramics at the Richmond Arts Centre. She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver, BC, Art Mur in Montreal, and the Canadian Sculpture Centre in Toronto, ON. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Audain Travel Award, the Won Lee Scholarship of the Sculptor’s Society of Canada, and the 2022 BC Arts Council Project Assistant Grant, respectively.