Natalie Hamada

/ Näyttelyt /

I probably was 17 when I started understanding that the feeling of home is not about a particular place but rather about how it feels. From there, my art practice was a tool to search for that in my surroundings, in myself, in people, in the past, and in the present. In a way to process and reflect on my own world, I started drawing faces and got hooked on visual storytelling and the way colors overlap to express a story.

Colors can interpret feelings, and highlight a lot of details, while texture has its role in enriching or reducing the density of an outcome. My work focuses mainly on portraits that are made of a blend of both warm and cool color tones, and both figuration and abstraction. They are a dialogue between the past and the present. The base is usually a tale, a tale that gave me a vision to be created and led my instinct.

What Makes a Place Home focuses on the human condition and characteristics within the complexities of feeling home. The works’ grounds are a collage of multiple different pieces that I build together. I pick some shards out and place others in, draw a section on top, and play with the form to finalize the puzzle until it makes sense to me. The aim is to contemplate belonging. Over the last year, my work has been inspired by reading the Kalevala and learning about its symbolic style. It is an epic that once helped shape a shared sense of identity and belonging to many, and later played a role in the broader language debates that accompanied Finland’s movement toward independence.

In this exhibition, I work with Kalevala-related motifs and narrative elements, and reinterpret them through printmaking. The work is made through collage and digital drawing first, and then through silkscreen in a stencil-based layering process. These layered techniques reflect how memory and cultural meanings are formed gradually, through accumulation and reinterpretation over time.

Through these works, I return to a simple question: what makes a place home?
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of the Arts Promotion Centre
Finland (Taike) and the Finnish Art Society (Suomen Taideyhdistys).

Natalie Hamada is a visual artist and printmaker based in Helsinki. Her work addresses social issues, collective memory, and the traces of war. It combines bold color and graphic contrast with a portrait approach connected to historical painting traditions. Natalie reimagines portraiture as a site of storytelling and connection, a way to move beyond physical likeness and reveal hidden facets of the inner self. Her process combines hand-printing, drawing, stenciling, and collage; layering and obscuring fragments of old portraits. By merging disparate figures and motifs, Natalie articulates memories and vulnerabilities, seeking to give form to what is undefined, forgotten, or unspoken.
Natalie’s recent exhibitions include Myymälä2 (2023); Titanik Gallery, Project Room, Ratamo Gallery, and Low Gallery, Latvia (2022), among other venues. Her works have also been shown in major international print events, including the Bucharest International Print Biennale, Romania (2019), the International Print Triennial in Cieszyn, Poland (2018), and the International Print Biennial in Varna, Bulgaria (2017). Her works are represented in several collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki)–Kansan Sivistysrahasto’s collection, Jyväskylä Art Museum, and the National Museum of Romanian Literature–Bucharest. Natalie completed her Master’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, in 2022.