My name is noa hāmana (b. 1998), I am an Ngāti Kura, Ngāpuhi, and Ngāti Toa interdisciplinary visual artist based in Naarm, Melbourne.

Born to a British mother and Māori father, I grew up in Ōtautahi before moving to London in 2016. There my familiar and idyllic world became juxtaposed by a confronting and thrilling one. From witnessing Brexit, to halls of stolen artefacts, to Basquiat's Boom For Real exhibition at the Barbican (2017) – an enthusiasm for art and history was sowed. But more importantly, in the cultural melting pot that London is, being Māori became a much deeper point of introspection. Although it was nice to be a rat in the sink of vice, this second home ignited an understanding of my inherent link between identity, migration, and place.

Mā te ngākau aroha koe e ārahi. As one door closed another opened back to the South Pacific. After a year in Australia Covid-19 struck, and as the world recoiled into isolation and conspiracy, I was conveniently in the middle of studying English literature and anthropology. These disciplines were serendipitous in cultivating an obsession for stories and the people who tell them, and taught me how to experience and articulate Te Ao Māori from the inside out.

With plans to write in the age of digital media, dissociation and insecurity make it a difficult pursuit. Nonetheless, my passion for storytelling endures where painting is the coup de grâce in my creative methodology — capturing moments, scenes, or images that blur the lines between the past and the present. In this temporal dissonance my work offers relief from a missing future. It carries forward: ‘kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua’, I walk into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.

Just as colonialism suspended our ancestors in a liminal space between worlds, today, capitalism pushes us to the edge of a catastrophic end. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes Mark Twain said. From lines of orators I speak from the diaspora, picking up what has been left behind, revealing threads of narrative that bind us together.