Where Light Remembers: The Art of Tatiana Hellum

Autumn Passage

Tatiana Hellum paints in the space where memory lingers. Her work does not attempt to depict the world directly, but to evoke the atmosphere in which lived experience settles. Colour in her paintings is not an element of description. It is the emotional register through which her story unfolds.

Hellum lives and works in Oslo. Yet her journey begins in Almaty, surrounded by vast open skies and warm luminous air. This early landscape shaped her sensory world long before she entered the studio. The light in Central Asia carries a fullness that touches everything it rests upon. It does not simply illuminate. It vibrates. It breathes. It invites an awareness of the horizon as something both distant and intimate.

Presence

Her path into art, however, was not immediate. She studied in Russia and completed a PhD in biology, a field that demands attention to structures that lie beneath what is visible. Scientific study teaches patience with complexity. It reveals the quiet order that exists inside apparent chaos. The shift from laboratory to studio was not a break, but a continuation. The same sensitivity to hidden rhythm now moves through her paintings.

Almost two decades ago she relocated to Norway. The light changed. The warm radiance of the South gave way to a quieter clarity that settles slowly across surfaces and landscapes. Norwegian light is reflective rather than expansive. It creates stillness rather than intensity. The contrast between these two qualities of light forms a lasting dialogue in Hellum’s work. One carries memory. The other creates space for reflection.

Her paintings are created primarily in acrylic, built in layers that invite the viewer to look more than once and to look slowly. She works through intuition. A gesture begins a conversation. She responds. A mark remains. Another dissolves. A surface forms through movement, pause and reconsideration. Her palette knife works alongside subtle glazes, allowing both spontaneity and precision to coexist.

Confluence

Turquoise appears frequently in her paintings. It feels like air. It feels like distance. It carries something of both sea and sky. Around this tone, other colours gather as atmosphere rather than shape. These colours recall the quiet hour before snowfall, or the moment the sun lifts from the horizon but has not yet warmed the ground. They are colours of transition. They hold memory without narrative.

Art has always belonged to her family. Her great grandfather painted religious icons. An uncle pursued art professionally. Creativity did not appear as a dramatic calling. It existed as part of daily life. The movement from science to painting was not an escape. It was a recognition of a language that had always been present.

Hellum has exhibited in group exhibitions in Norway, and her work resides in private collections both locally and internationally. Yet the measure of her work does not rest on visibility or scale. It rests in resonance. Her paintings encourage the viewer to slow the pace at which they observe. They create a space of quiet concentration. They offer presence rather than statement.

Soaring Through The Dreams

Travel remains a source of continual influence. She does not paint places. She paints the atmosphere a place leaves behind. The changing light of different landscapes. The quiet or restlessness of passing weather. The feeling of time experienced differently when elsewhere. These impressions gather within her paintings as tone and rhythm, not image.

The essence of Hellum’s work lies in balance. The warmth of the South and the clarity of the North. The analytical eye of the scientist and the intuitive hand of the painter. The memory of what has been lived and the space of what remains still to be understood.

Tatiana Hellum paints the place where light remembers. She invites the viewer to join her there.