noa hāmana (b.1998)

Ngāti Kura, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Toa, Ingarangi

My art is an interrogation of the past, peeling back its layers where history and nightmares are indistinguishable. Through a cartoonish style inspired by fantasy and horror, my practice digs into personal and cultural memory to reveal a mythology which reflects the experience of being positioned between worlds. My work invites the observer to partake in the interrogation, to sit with tension and uncertainty, whilst provoking curiosity towards the unknown. In blurring the lines between time and place, the real and the non-real, I attempt to make the past readable again. Taking the direction of ‘kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua’ –  I walk backwards into the future, with my eyes fixed on the past. It’s an act of picking up what’s been left behind, piecing fragments of a broken vessel back together to show that every story has already been told before.

I began painting from literature and anthropology– two disciplines which presented a key to the doors of my whakapapa. This encouraged me to fuse culture and storytelling together to tell my own story and better understand the worlds I move between. As such, I have a measured, spontaneous, and somewhat insatiable appetite for different branches of knowledge, such as mātauranga Māori, toi Māori, colonialism, economics, ancient history, and literature. Knowledge is an endless pursuit, yet the more I know the more I don’t. In the pursuit of understanding what it means to be human comes images —- in books, dreams, pdfs, or day to day life, ideas arise which I capture with the brush. In image making, intuition is a guiding tool, a conversation between feeling and knowing, where what goes on the canvas is left to improvisation. Beginning with abstraction, then leaning into refinement, my process is defined by a series of uncanny moments where the image has its own spirit. It appears by itself. An image which holds equal truths, hides in obscurity, plays with humour, and holds universality and difference with equal weight. In being positioned between worlds I present an inner world that reconciles the tension of a duality. That when you lob something out into the universe, it’ll sometimes lob something back.

If you’d like to know more about my work, or a specific painting, get in touch!