Merike Estna (born in Estonia, 1980) lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in painting in 2005 and obtained a MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College University of London in 2009. The work of Merike Estna is largely invested in the processes of painting, as a way of approaching the artwork as an integral part of life rather than about life. In her process-based work, Estna is embedding patterns and colour combinations from the crafts and applied arts, vocabularies which have not traditionally been accepted in the visual language of painting. Thus, her work is challenging the masculine territory of painting and questioning the strict visual separation between painting and craft discourses.