Bio

Hanna Kojima Boyd is a Japanese and American oil painter based in London, UK. She began her BA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco before transferring to Falmouth University, where she was awarded a BA(hons) in Fine Art. Upon graduation, she was nominated and shortlisted for the New Blood Emerging Art Prize. She then went on to complete a Graduate Diploma in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art.

Statement

My oil paintings are an amalgamation of a research-based practice exploring lived experience through writing and photography. Through photography, I capture fleeting moments, particularly reflections, transforming the ordinary into something contemplative, revealing subtleties that might otherwise go unnoticed. Writing traces my shifting states of mind, documenting transient thoughts, and works alongside my paintings to invite the viewer into the narrative from a different perspective. Together, these practices allow me to explore themes of trauma, love, friendship, womanhood, self-identity, and belonging, balancing introspection with critical reflection. Using these source materials, I approach painting as a temporal, iterative process, in which each layer functions as both record and revision, a sedimented trace of decisions made, reconsidered, and rearticulated. My work emerges in atmospheric oil paintings built slowly through many translucent, veil-like layers, often retaining an intentional ambiguity. Each surface becomes a site of negotiation, where image and memory are not simply represented but actively mediated through material encounter. Through this structural recompositing, I reappropriate the narratives of these memories, drawing out their underlying currents; perspectives that are vital, yet often consciously suppressed.