Over the past nine years, Õllek’s practice has returned to the deep sea, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, including its hypoxic zones. Her work considers aquatic life under pressure, from cyanobacteria to filter feeders, which the artist describes as “the living archives of our contaminated environment.”

Õllek is especially interested in marine habitats in relation to new technologies, and in the geopolitical and ecological conditions bound up with them. Her installations treat matter as evidence. In her work, the sea acts as a recording surface, carrying traces of human action, technological development and environmental change. Salt, crystal and chemical processes function not only as visual phenomena, but as ways of attending more closely to what is happening around and beneath us.

Recent years have brought Õllek’s work into a wide international field. Her commissioned works for Konrad Mägi at Dulwich Picture Gallery were curated by Kathleen Soriano, while her work was included in For All At Last Return at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, curated by Emma Dean. In 2024, she presented a major duo exhibition at Kai Art Center, Tallinn, with Finnish artist Tuomas A. Laitinen.

The past two years have been the most active and internationally significant period of Õllek’s practice to date. She has taken part in 20 exhibitions across Estonia, England, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, Greece, the United States, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. She has also undertaken four international artist residencies in Sweden, England, France and Finland, each offering new contexts of place and sea to work with.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Kai Art Center, Kumu Art Museum, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, State of Concept, La Traverse, Zeppelin Museum, A Tale of A Tub, Le Lieu Unique, Screen City Biennial and Fotomuseum Winterthur, among others.

Õllek’s champion is Emma Dean, Senior Curator at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Dean first came across Õllek’s practice while researching marine ecosystems and the effects of human activity on ocean life for an exhibition.

“When I first met Kristina in Tallinn in 2022 as a guest of the Estonian Ministry of Culture, I was developing ideas for a major group exhibition exploring marine ecosystems and the impacts of human activity on ocean life. After seeing a series of her extraordinary salt-encrusted sculptures in her studio, I invited Kristina to undertake a month-long research residency at Baltic, resulting in the new commission Breathing Deep Currency (2025), an installation that combines scientific research, material experimentation and poetic reflection to reveal the fragile and often unseen processes shaping marine environments.”

For Dean, the strength of Õllek’s work lies in the depth of its research and the particular sensitivity of its forms:

“It has been a pleasure collaborating with Kristina over the past four years. Working at the intersection of art and ecology, her practice is underpinned by rigorous research and a deep knowledge of the ocean, and I have learnt so much through our many conversations. Her delicate crystalline structures are quiet indicators of environmental change – barometers of the atmosphere around them, but also of the health of the ocean, revealing both its resilience and its vulnerability.”

It is easy to see why Dean was drawn to Õllek’s work. While grounded in rigorous research, her practice is equally shaped by the unpredictable behaviour of matter: salt crystallising, surfaces shifting, materials responding to their surrounding conditions. The viewer is invited to stay with processes that usually pass unseen, and Õllek’s work does not need to declare crisis loudly in order to make it felt.

Dean’s final words offer a precise frame for an artist whose work asks us to think about the sea as part of the shared conditions of life:

“At a moment when the future of our planet hangs in the balance, her work reminds us that what happens beneath the surface is inseparable from life above it.”