Hamaoui deploys elements of the natural world in a visual vocabulary that seeks to articulate deeply personal experience. Layering dense, variegated foliage rendered in paints which themselves derive from local flora, Hamaoui conjures the density of the rainforest and the impenetrability of Brazil’s vast wilderness. Flowers and ferns melt into one another, perpetually on the brink of transformation—an inner landscape nearly bodily in its perpetual state of flux: growing, evolving, breathing, digesting. With rich, textured surfaces and a sense of depth captured in seemingly unending layers, each canvas a portal into this strange, tropical memoryscape.

The symbolic, too, enters Hamaoui’s oeuvre through nature. A curved crescent form—a painted gesture, more than anything—recurs throughout Hamaoui’s work. Understood, at first as lunar, Hamaoui eventually began to rotate the form, flipping it on its side, turning it upside down. Upon reading Ellis Island, Georges Perec’s moving meditation on immigration and identity, this overturned crescent came to resemble, in Hamaoui’s mind, that of a sailing vessel, conjuring associations with grand journeys and recalling Redon’s mythic seascapes—as well as her parents’ own tales of migration to Brazil. Never explicitly operating as sea-faring vessels, the subtle boat-like forms nevertheless lend the work a sense of the sense of liminality, where—to borrow a phrase from Perec—one may have left, but they have not yet arrived.