noa hāmana (b. 1998) is a Melbourne based artist communicating 21st century Indigeneity. In a rapid and playful style, hāmana moves between tradition and innovation to create a unique cultural vocabulary through worldbuilding and storytelling. Visual journeys of his whakapapa reach the canvas surface, space and time folds where cultural figures, forms, patterns, and motifs fuse with personal context and experience.

Born in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, hāmana is a descendant of Ngāti Kura, and Te Whare tapu o Ngāpuhi. He grapples with themes of colonisation and imperialism upon Māori and its intergenerational effects, bringing an adaptive and creative quality to cultural connection, as well as cultural sustenance and loss.

His approach to the canvas is direct and immediate, it foregrounds Indigenous worldviews, showing its potential towards further understanding our collective humanity. hāmana presents this through measured questioning against systems of power, dismantling conceptions,arresting time, transmitting memory, and emptying dreams into paintings.

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