Hama Woods: wildlife, constructed spaces and ecological stencil art

Hama Woods is an Oslo-based Norwegian artist whose stencil work examines the relationship between animals and the environments people make around them. Working with hand-cut, layered stencils and spray paint, she places recognisable wildlife within settings that can feel deliberately artificial. Her publisher GraffitiPrints connects this practice to questions of consumption and humanity’s effect on nature. Animals provide the visible subject, while human decisions form the surrounding problem.

Wildlife in constructed spaces

The contrast between an animal and its setting is particularly clear in Enjoy the Silence, Woods’ debut United States solo exhibition at Vertical Gallery in Chicago in May 2022. The gallery described original canvases that set monochrome mammals and birds against colourful geometric environments. It situated those works within a sustained concern with consumerism, rather than presenting the animals as detached studies of natural history.

Vertical dates the start of her career to 2009 and records earlier participation in its group exhibitions, including Atomic Number 13 in 2021. That exhibition history helps connect her gallery paintings with a practice also visible in public murals. Our reading is that the invented structures around the animals make the viewer consider who controls the space and what conditions the inhabitant must negotiate. The image remains immediately legible, but its setting complicates an uncomplicated celebration of wildlife.

From painted layers to physical objects

Woods’ work is not confined to one support. Krause Gallery documents canvases, works on paper and bronze or brass sculpture, describing the sculptural work as carrying the same concerns as her paintings. Its catalogue includes Broken View as both a painted canvas and a bronze work. A repeated title can therefore connect an idea across media without establishing that the objects share a production method or edition identity.

Climb to Safety—Washed Grey, shown here as representative artwork through Krause, translates that vocabulary into a screenprint. The pictured animal climbs a brightly coloured geometric structure. The scene gives a concrete example of the tension between wildlife and constructed space; the photographed impression’s edition designation is not established here. The catalogue’s separate material descriptions remain important even when the subject is familiar.

An ecological argument across media

Galleri A’s ECO exhibition places Woods’ work in an explicitly ecological conversation. Its account links her animal subjects with urbanisation, consumption and sustainability. The presentation includes canvas and paper works alongside The View, described as acrylic on a CNC-milled Valchromat board. Those supports show the range of her object-making without requiring every work to function as a conventional print.

For collectors, the durable connection is Woods’ treatment of nature within human-made conditions. A mural encountered in a city, a layered painting and a published edition can participate in that enquiry while retaining different physical identities. Reading the recurring imagery alongside the material record makes the breadth of the practice visible, rather than reducing it to a single animal motif reproduced in different sizes.